Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being a couple years late definitely was bad but they also completely blew the performance, especially for ia32 compatibility. Shipping on time would have made the performance gap less bad but I rarely saw it being competitive with what would have been the competition at that time even before you factored cost in. Unless your workload was just Intel’s hand-tuned assembly it was usually cheaper to buy 2 x86 boxes and…
You're absolutely right, hence my hesitancy. IA-32 emulation performance was one particular weak spot. A fellow analyst at the time said something along the lines of "Itanium's IA-32 performance was not only not in the ballpark; it was not in the parking lot outside the ballpark." Itanium was also, in many ways, designed for a world where ILP, rather than TLP, ruled. That distinction wouldn't become terribly importan…
Re: Intel to Discontinue Itanium 9700 ‘Kittson’ Processor, the Last of the Itaniums
#211Intel initially didn't plan on having fast IA-32 performance. The IA-32 part of the chip was called the "IVE" which was short for the "Intel Value Engine." The thought was that it was enough for the chip to boot in IA-32 mode to be compatible and it was expected that you would set up system state and jump to 64-bit mode as fast as possible. So really it was just meant for compatibility. I imagined it was just a dusty corner of the chip using some old 486 core to take up the least amount of space.