As a developer of out-of-order CPU (model, but studied the effects on real code and did my best to make it synthesable) I can assure you there's a lot of ILP to extract even from ordinary programs.

The problem with Itanium is that it wasn't OoO and can't be made such.

Just to give you a hint - just computing various kinds of addresses in advance can make huge difference. Compute branch address, issue a fetch, compute load address, issue a fetch (even when destination register is blocked). Voila! Your program is sped up significantly.