It was also planned for a world where high-end CPUs were differentiated by their ability to run floating-point-heavy workloads with relatively predictable memory access patterns.

The rise of the web—and databases behind it—as the dominant high-end, high-margin workload obsoleted that assumption.

There’s a great presentation floating around where a Compaq-acquired-DEC engineer is trying to justify how great the OpenVMS port from Alpha to Itanium is going, despite benchmarks showing Alpha smoking Itanium running Apache.