The Future of Hardware Is Software
&gt; A classic example is Itanium: it is only a historical footnote today, but Itanium’s explicit parallelism and focus on scalability once made it look like the future of CPUs. The problem was never the hardware itself—it was difficult compilation and backward compatibility with the x86 software ecosystem that doomed Itanium.<p>The problem with the Itanium <i>was</i> the hardware itself.  Finding sufficient ILP on general purpose loads for a VLIW like Itanium is an unsolved problem in compiler design.  Saying the problem with Itanium was software would be like entering a drag-racer in formula 1 and saying the problem was that the drivers weren&#x27;t good enough at steering.