Also a major issue was the big iron shared memory systems that Itanium targeted. They collectively fell out of favor with the trend towards Virtualised x64 commodity clusters and later the cloud. I’d love to see an EPIC strategy for a CPU targeted at smaller systems. Perhaps implementing webassembly based actors in hardware and support for messaging and pmem. Wasmcloud in hardware.
The way I see, disaggregation will be a thing and we may be back to large shared memory racks in cloud datacenters. While an individual cloud machine can range from small to very large (effectively one fully dedicated host) a rack-sized server enables much larger (and profitable) offerings. Scaling up has limits, but it's very comfortable to have the option when needed.
