Itanium was a trojan horse to get their rivals to give up on MIPS/Alpha/UltraSparc development. As soon as those CPUs lost all traction, Intel dumped Itanium as well. Intel was never serious about the Itanium. Considering how performance sensitive it ought to be, Intel chose to build Itaniums on older manufacturing processes. The fact that Itanium performance was hopeless should not have been a surprise.