The contemporaneous IBM POWER ISA was implemented in superscalar CPU cores with out-of-order execution and with SMT and it would provide superior performance in any equivalent fabrication technology.
The Itanium ISA actually had a few nice features, but it also had other bad features that outweighed the good features. Besides the static instruction scheduling in bundles, there was also the handicap of using SPARC style register windows, which slowed-down context switches.
The second version of HP PA-RISC, which was too quickly replaced by Itanium, would have had good chances of providing superior performance in comparison with Itanium, had it not been abandoned without a fight.
Comments
The contemporaneous IBM POWER ISA was implemented in superscalar CPU cores with out-of-order execution and with SMT and it would provide superior performance in any equivalent fabrication technology.
The Itanium ISA actually had a few nice features, but it also had other bad features that outweighed the good features. Besides the static instruction scheduling in bundles, there was also the handicap of using SPARC style register windows, which slowed-down context switches.
The second version of HP PA-RISC, which was too quickly replaced by Itanium, would have had good chances of providing superior performance in comparison with Itanium, had it not been abandoned without a fight.