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Microsoft abandoned it last year, and in January Intel discontinued compiler support. Not exactly the first rats to leave...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium

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The loss of Intel compiler support is really telling. IA-64 leans very heavily on its compiler to get good performance -- it's almost as much a compiler project as a silicon one.

Discontinuing a support for a product developers don't use isn't really telling at all. Most Itanium development is done using compilers from the operating system vendor, not with ICC. Intel still provides the code generators for those compilers.

It is if the only selling point for the chip was it's advanced capabilities if you used the custom compiler.

If people are only buy Itaniums to run legacy x86 code THAT is significant - it would be like Apple announcing sales of Macbooks but admitting everyone just used them to run Windows

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