Itanium
From TPU Reference
Officially designed by Intel and HP to replace all x86 processors the Itanium is an infamous server processor. In 2001 the first Itanium named Merced was released, however it was a rarely used . The Itanium was designed to perform multiple operations in parallel, which theoretically made it up to 6x as fast as other processors from it's era. It relied heavily on compilers making code that could be executed in parallel, which made real world performance less than optimal in many scenarios. Even though many people consider the Itanium a failure and jokingly call it "Itanic" (referring to how the Titanic) the Itanium does hold a small share of the server market. It's value is mainly found in huge database clusters and supercomputers. There was even a Itanium based Supercomputer listed in the Supercomputer top 500 at place 34 in 2001.
Because the Itanium was released 2 years late, had little available software, was not cheap, and far from freely available the Itanium was replaced by it's successor a year later, the Itanium 2.
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