They also aimed at what turned out to be the wrong target: When Itanium was conceived, high-performance CPUs were for technical applications like CAD and physics simulation. Raw floating point throughput was what mattered. And Itanium ended up pretty darn good at that.

But between conception and delivery, the web took over the world. Branchy integer code was now the dominant server workload & workstations were getting crowded out of their niche by the commodity economics of x86.