title: What are the technical reasons behind the "Itanium fiasco", if any?
body: <p>In <a href="http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2339629,00.asp" rel="noreferrer">this article</a> Jonh Dvorak calls Itanium "<em>one of the great fiascos of the last 50 years</em>". While he describes the over-optimistic market expectations and the dramatic financial outcome of the idea, he doesn't go into the technical details of this epic fail. I had my chance to work with Itanium for some period of time and I personally loved its architecture, it was so clear and simple and straightforward in comparison to the modern x86 processors architecture...</p>
  
  <p>So then what are/were the technical reasons of its failure? Under-performance? Incompatibility with x86 code? Complexity of compilers? Why did this "Itanic" sink?</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/Itanium.png" alt="Itanium processor block"></p>