Itanium was, and really still is, a pretty solid system. Incredibly per thread performance and massive cache. You can run Windows on them with zero memory - because the entire OS can operate out of cache! It is really just the price and lack of available operating systems that got them. If the chips were only twice the price of a top end Xeon or Operton and if Linux was broadly available on it, even from just a single major vendor, it would make a huge difference.