On a similar note, porting Linux to Itanium — A System Implementor’s Tale [PDF]
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix05/tech/general/gr...
and, NonStop on Itanium [PDF]:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David_Bernick/publicati...
Amusingly similar to the much more recent slide decks about the x86 port, e.g. https://vmssoftware.com/docs/State_of_Port_20171006.pdf
The Apache #’s pretty much give the game away: An Itanium clocked 50% higher was losing to a 2yo Alpha by about 20% on throughput at peak.
VLIW made sense when Intel wanted to win the FP-heavy workstation market. But while it was in development, integer-heavy web workloads became dominant and that was basically the ballgame.