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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2015, @05:33PM
> Which I daresay was more than 1.1 times faster than the "1.67GHz AMD Athlon XP 2100+ processor" and thus faster than the Itanium 2 before it even came out.
I really don't care enough about the topic to get involved in a benchmark peen measurement contest for something over a decade old. I'm just going to say that you've substantially moved the goalposts from "performance was pretty bad" and getting "the living crap beat out of it on benchmarks" to performance was neck-and-neck with the fastest competitors.