Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage

A historical note: Windows XP 64-bit Edition that was mentioned in the article, was Itanium-specific. It was based on XP kernel while Windows XP x64 Edition (for AMD64 architecture) was based on Windows Server 2003 kernel. Because of that, Windows XP x64 Edition had some significantly different performance characteristics compared to other Windows XP editions. If anything, it was closer to Vista than XP in some aspects.

I wonder if people are able to get Windows Server 2008 R2 to run on this yet as well. That was the last Windows OS to support Itanium, and it received updates until January 14, 2020.

EDIT: there was also an additional patch released in May 2020 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2008_R2#Itanium

I miss itanium. I feel like a madman for saying it, but I do. Something about it is just alluring to me. Alas, the problems were too hard to solve or weren't worth solving anymore

Ironically, it died around the time LLMs/AI started becoming good. I feel like the compiler problems with vliw could be solved to a degree with a purpose built ai

    XGCJ6-Q6XGJ-BQ2QQ-BRWJ7-67X7W

was there any advantage or special use case for running an itanium windows workstation instead of x86 back then?