The term "Itanic" jumped to mind several times using the
Itanium I.  Like Sparc64, but at Ultra-1 speeds.

Good thing everyone and their mom commited to using it, like
HP, SGI, etc, etc.  Otoh, the MIPS 16k is out.

Quoting Jason R Thorpe (thorpej@wasabisystems.com):
> On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 08:45:18AM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote:
> 
>  > the question is: is itanium processor overadvertised and is it jsut piece
>  > of crap, or linux for IA64 is piece of crap?
> 
> More like: Itanium (I) was slow junk (Itanium II is supposed to address
> many of the performance problems).  But IA64 requires a lot of help from
> the compiler to achieve any performance at all, and GCC is simply not up
> to the task yet.  Therefore, any code compiled by GCC for IA64 is going
> to be quite slow.
> 
>  > if second - will there be NetBSD/itanium sometime?
> 
> There will be NetBSD/ia64 at some point; a couple of NetBSD developers
> have systems.  But the IA64 seems almost irrelevant at this stage, and
> those developers are currently working on things that a lot more people
> care about.
> 
> -- 
>         -- Jason R. Thorpe <thorpej@wasabisystems.com>