alt Hacker NewsISAs fail to gain traction when the sufficiently smart compilers don't eventuate.
The x86-64 is a dog's breakfast of features. But due to its widespread use, compiler writers make the effort to create compilers that optimize for its quirks.
Itanium hardware designers were expecting the compiler writers to cater for its unique design. Intel is a semi company. As good as some of their compilers are, internally they invested more in their biggest seller and the Itanium never got the level of support that was anticipated at the outset.
I am a firm believer that if AMD wasn't in the position to be able to come up with AMD64 architecture, eventually those Itanium issues would have been sorted out, Windows XP was already there and there was no other way for 64 bit going forward.