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Re:C Is Not a Low-Level Language by mattnewport on Tuesday May 01, 2018 @02:56PM (#16970215)
> which ultimately doomed it even when a lot of the issues were resolved later on.

Was there ever a point in the Itanium's history where there were Itaniums that ran mainstream software with better performance than equivalently priced x64 processors?

Re:C Is Not a Low-Level Language by zlynx on Tuesday May 01, 2018 @03:30PM (#16970585)
There were hand-coded assembly loops that were 3-4 times faster than x86, using Itanium's predicates and rolling register windows.

But I guess you said mainstream. So unless you count database engines, I suppose the answer is "No."

Today you can get the same vector performance using SSE4 and AVX. Almost all of Itanium's good stuff has been rolled into Xeon.

Re:C Is Not a Low-Level Language by gh02t on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @01:11AM (#16974216)
As far as I know (which isn't very far, admittedly) they only really managed to reach parity with some performance gains over x86 in a few niches, but it's also a bit chicken-and-egg. It never had enough attention to really get the optimization and porting efforts it would have seen if it had been successful.