> It wouldn't surprise me if Itanium actually had pretty compelling SPECint numbers.

This was one of the more confusing things about Itanium. It's specifications on paper were really impressive. It had crazy high benchmark results (SPEC, Linpack, etc) compared to similarly clocked competing chips. If real world code behaved like those benchmarks Itanium would have blown other chips out of the water.

I don't know if I've ever seen real-world tests showing the Itanium getting anywhere near the performance of its benchmarks. Intel was also charging a huge premium for the privilege.