Raymond Chen recently posted a ten-part introduction to the ia64 architecture. Rapidly teaching me that while I might be able to write a brainfuck to perl compiler in a few minutes, there's no way in a million years that I'll ever be able to write a good compiler that targets ia64.
The Itanium is a 64-bit EPIC architecture. EPIC stands for Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing, a design in which work is offloaded from the processor to the compiler. For example, the compiler decides which operations can be safely performed in parallel and which memory fetches can be productively speculated. This relieves the processor from having to make these decisions on the fly, thereby allowing it to focus on the real work of processing.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by turgid on Sunday August 09 2015, @11:37AM
Back in 1999 when there were still several CPU architectures to choose from (before itanic hype killed them off) Sun did a port of Solaris to itanic. It didn't take long since the Solaris code base was pretty portable, however Sun didn't want to kill off SPARC so it was never released. It's a shame that Sun wasn't very good at getting it's own CPUs out. Look at what Fujitsu was able to achieve with SPARC...
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].