A brief history of the worst CPUs ever made

Intel's Itanium was a radical attempt to push hardware complexity into software optimizations. All of the work to determine which instructions to execute in parallel was handled by the compiler before the CPU ran a byte of code. Analysts predicted Itanium would conquer the world. It didn't. Compilers were unable to extract necessary performance and the chip was radically incompatible with everything that had come before it. Once expected to replace x86 entirely and change the world, Itanium limped along for years with a niche market and precious little else.