Itanium 1 had hardware x86 compatibility and Itanium 2 had software x86 emulation just like Apple. It wasn't enough.

Right.

PPC was significantly faster than m68k. Intel was significantly faster again. Finally ARM was yet again.

(ARM and Intel especially on laptops)

They could pay the emulation price and still come out equal or usually on top. Even when equal there were often other benefits, like reduced heat.

As I remember hearing Itanium was a dog with x86 code. It never got fast enough to compete let alone supplant it during emulation right?

So it wasn’t (meaningfully?) faster on recompiled code or new code. It wasn’t faster on new code. But it cost way more.

Not a winning combination.

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wmf a day ago | parent [-]

IIRC Itanium was faster on natively compiled HPC code, presumably because it had more FPUs and larger cache than the Pentium 4. But in general it probably wasn't a good upgrade and Intel would have had to sandbag x86 a lot to force Itanium adoption.

	▲	AnthonyMouse a day ago \| parent [-]
		The other problem was that the Pentium 4 itself was kind of a dog, and then the Pentium M and Core lines started making that look bad, by which point the Itanic passengers could feel their socks getting wet and a growing concern about there not being enough life boats.

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pjmlp a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Only because AMD exists it wasn't enough. Had Intel been free to decide where x86 goes, the Itanium story would be much different.

Apple succeeds on their hardware transitions exactly because there isn't a clones market.