It was also planned for a world where high-end CPUs were differentiated by their ability to run floating-point-heavy workloads with relatively predictable memory access patterns.

The rise of the web—and databases behind it—as the dominant high-end, high-margin workload obsoleted that assumption.

There’s a great presentation floating around where a Compaq-acquired-DEC engineer is trying to justify how great the OpenVMS port from Alpha to Itanium is going, despite benchmarks showing Alpha smoking Itanium running Apache.

If only the Alpha had hung on.

I worked for a company that had a fairly large OpenVMS installation and had to make the transition from Alpha to Itanium. It required a considerable amount of work and the early iterations of Itanium did not provide a clear performance improvement over the final Alpha EV7z that we had been using in some GS1280s.

Going by my faulty memory, I'd say it wasn't until Tukwila that it was a clear win over Alpha EV7z. By the time Tukwila arrived, it was pretty clear that Itanium's goose was already cooked.