I thought Itanium was just an HP thing? HP killed their own PA-RISC and DEC’s Alpha (which HP acquired via Compaq) in favour of Itanic, which left POWER (still holding on at IBM), SPARC (pretty much died with Sun), and MIPS (dunno, tbh).
It was an odd strategy from a company that obviously had no future and nothing left to offer. At the time, I had built up so much animus against SGI for their outrageous pricing and unbelievably annoying FlexLM software licensing that it was amusing to me. Their god damned MIPS Pro compiler spent more cycles checking its license file than actually compiling a small C file. And the FlexLM system was so badly written that it did nothing to stop piracy and any user could trick it into overwriting any file on the system. They claimed to patch it, but never actually fixed it. At least they open-sourced XFS. That was nice of them.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/nasa-gets-sgi-2048-core-itaniu...