Comment Re:Remember the last couple of times this happened (Score 1) 326
There's a world of difference between massive # of regular cores--which, if harder to program for is well-understood--and the Itanium, which introduced a whole new concept with its EPIC architecture.
The EPIC architecture seemed like a good idea--let the compiler take care of most of the instruction re-ordering, and get rid of branch predictions where at all possible by introducing speculative instructions in its stead.
But as it turned out, writing a good compiler for this architecture is hard if not impossible...