> It killed a lot of other interesting architectures and gave nothing in return.
What sort of architectures (if any) got killed as a direct result of developing IA-64?
That aside, though odd and impractical, I found Itanium to be at least a technically interesting perspective (both in terms of architecture, ie VLIW, and in terms of the amount of technical work it inspired at HP and Intel, such as the Itanium C++ abi [1])