EPIC failure (to cancel the project when it was first failing)

I spent 1999-2003 porting a mathematical modeller to Itanium on Windows and HP-UX. I was one of the first to ship commercial software on Itanium, but it never made any money. The only positives from the work were educational. I had a lot of contact with Intel, and an excellent engineering contact, and got some insight into their thinking.

They never had a real plan for how to make compilers discover the parallelization opportunities that they wanted to exist in single-threaded code. The intention was to have a horde of developers, and discover lots of heuristics that would add up to that. Essentially, a fantasy, but it meant the compiler team got to add more people and its managers got career progression. This had started early in the project, when the compiler people claimed "we can handle that" for many of the difficulties in hardware design.