The Itanium family has used large chips on a mature process to implement its products,while the x86 has used smaller chips on the leading edge process. I wish that the two families had been implemented on the same process node simultaneously to allow a proper comparison. That will be finally be happening at 32nm.
I was always skeptical about the Itanium premise for superiority being the elimination of the extra transistors needed by the Out of Order Execution logic.OOO was scary to most computer designers, but once this beast was tamed the justification for Itanium should have been revisited, since with time those extra transistors ceased to be significant. Now the claim is being made that OOO is a power hog, and once you are power dissipation constrained,Itanium will live upto its potential. We will have to wait to see whether the potential is realized.
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