We need to stop trying to do transparent caching, and instead give developers control over what happens. Itanium wasn't wrong, it was just ahead of its time.
Though I think we're getting now to the point that we would have gotten to then. AMD bought x86 another 15 years of life.
In Portugal there were only PCs with Intel CPUs around, the Cyrix, NEC and other clones were hardly anywhere to find until the first Athlons came to be.
Years ago, I remember reading Itanium stalled because writing compilers to ably support speculative instructions was hard or simply impossible.