The Apache #’s pretty much give the game away: An Itanium clocked 50% higher was losing to a 2yo Alpha by about 20% on throughput at peak.<p>VLIW made sense when Intel wanted to win the FP-heavy workstation market. But while it was in development, integer-heavy web workloads became dominant and that was basically the ballgame.
On a similar note, porting Linux to Itanium — A System Implementor’s Tale [PDF]<p><a href="https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix05/tech/general/gray/gray.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix05/tech/general/gr...</a><p>and, NonStop on Itanium [PDF]:<p><a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David_Bernick/publication/4156599_NonStopR_advanced_architecture/links/004635284fae9e5834000000/NonStopR-advanced-architecture.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David_Bernick/publicati...</a>
Amusingly similar to the much more recent slide decks about the x86 port, e.g. <a href="https://vmssoftware.com/docs/State_of_Port_20171006.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://vmssoftware.com/docs/State_of_Port_20171006.pdf</a>