:::Then still we need some technical article where they actually test CPUs and have some evidence beyond just "itanium is 2x slower than something (we won't even say which model is something)". Also, IIRC, Wilamette with frequency of 2x is about as slow/fast as Coppermine with the frequency of x; that is, 2GHz Wilamette was comparable to 1GHz Coppermine. And by combining this with "a 800Mhz Itanium would have been very impressive compared to an 800Mhz Pentium" we get that Wilamette even at 2GHz is certainly not 2x faster than itanium, and maybe is not faster at all. Also, from the article it seems that Itanium was aimed exclusively at enterprises, which it did well.