While the Itanium failed the Ageia PPU did succeed with its compiler. It was acquired by NVIDIA and became CUDA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ageia

It did indeed get merged into the CUDA group but I think the internal CUDA project predated it, or at least, several of the engineers working on it did

That's not the same PPU, is it?

I always thought CUDA grew out of Ian Buck's PhD thesis under Pat Hanrahan; why do you credit Ageia?

Indeed, a very smart compiler would be necessary, perhaps too much for the current compiler art, like the itaniun.

But...how about specializing to problems with inherent paralelism? LLMs maybe?

The Itanium C and FORTRAN compilers eventually became very, very good. By then, the hardware was falling behind. Intel couldn't justify putting it on their latest process node or giving it the IPC advancements that were developed for x86.

If you wanted to do something similar right now, it's possible to succeed. Your approach has to be very different. Get a lot of advancements into LLVM ahead of time, perhaps. Change the default ideas around teaching programming ("use structured concurrency except where it is a bad idea" vs "use traditional programming except where structured concurrency makes sense", etc)

But no, throwing a new hardware paradigm out into the world with nothing but a bunch of hype is not going to work. That could only work in the software world.

Is this like the Itanium architecture with its compiler challenges?