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I wasted more time SSHed into an Itanic than most people had to, so I'm speaking from first-hand experience. Some very, very specific Itanium code was a bit faster than the equivalent x86 or similar. That was always some very tightly scoped thing that did the exact same tight loop a gazillion times, like en-/decrypting a data stream. Anything more heterogenous ran poorly, as in multiple times the wall-clock time of the same workload on the x86 server next to it that cost a tenth as much. And that's even when using the magic Intel compilers.
Itanium was bad. The compiler tech didn't exist to make it not-bad, and in retrospect I think it become obvious that it couldn't exist. It wasn't a matter of the compiler authors needing to be clever. It was more like making Itanium live up to the hype required making P=NP.
And ia64 was only around 23% slower and several times more costly than amd64 options at the time. Both toads had their warts, but one was actually usable by mere mortals.
Its true just about everything either ran slow on not at all on ia64... Thankfully, we were still running Sparc based platforms at that time, as the Intel clown-show still looked like more work. But I do empathize with the ia64 trauma, as the roll out had a lot of collateral damage in some firms as people started jumping ship early to avoid accountability. =3
People were bad at handling parallelism with ia64, and still have problems today on better amd platforms with less janky compilers.
The fact an $800 chip still can beat a $14000 chip at some tasks probably should tell people something about concurrency scaling overhead. =3
And pivoting to concurrency on a rescheduler-intensive core as opposed to concurrency on a scheduler-based core isn’t very pertinent, particularly since we have 25 years of Moore’s Law between then and now.
How many strings does a Bass play with in water? =3