Itanium was a 64-bit chip designed by HP and Intel. at a cost of billions, that supported parallel processing. Sales were supposed to reach $38 billion/year in sales in 2001. Instead, only a few thousand servers were sold that year.
HP did manage to sell $4.4 billion of Itanium servers in 2008, but sales have declined ever since. HP is a true believer, having paid Intel nearly a billion dollars to keep making new versions. The new Poulson version will be released this year, but it will probably be the end of the road.
The problem? It is way too complex. The x86-64 competing designs by AMD and Intel were a simple (at least in comparison) update of the venerable x86 architecture.
" From a technical perspective, Itanium was, and still is, a vast
improvement over x86. How could it not be? It includes all the latest
thinking about CPU architecture; it had the input of the best minds in
the business; it had Intel's awesome financial and marketing resources
behind it. Absolutely everything was new and improved. It was a
technical tour de force. And yet what people wanted was a faster x86."
--http://www.eejournal.com/archives/articles/20110309-itanium/
The lesson? Don't try to reinvent the wheel. Instead, find something that works, and make incremental improvements. If something isn't working - let it go.
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