When first released in 2001, Itanium's performance was disappointing compared to better-established RISC and CISC processors.
Emulation to run existing x86 applications and operating systems was particularly poor, with one benchmark in 2001 reporting that it was equivalent at best to a 100 MHz Pentium in this mode (1.1 GHz Pentiums were on the market at that time).

Itanium failed to make significant inroads against IA-32 or RISC, and suffered further following the arrival of x86-64 systems which offered greater compatibility with older x86 applications.

In a 2009 article on the history of the processor — "How the Itanium Killed the Computer Industry" — journalist John C. Dvorak reported "This continues to be one of the great fiascos of the last 50 years".
Tech columnist Ashlee Vance commented that the delays and underperformance "turned the product into a joke in the chip industry".
In an interview, Donald Knuth said "The Itanium approach...was supposed to be so terrific—until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write."

Both Red Hat and Microsoft announced plans to drop Itanium support in their operating systems due to lack of market interest; however, other Linux distributions such as Gentoo and Debian remain available for Itanium.
On March 22, 2011, Oracle Corporation announced that it would no longer develop new products for HP-UX on Itanium, although it would continue to provide support for existing products.
Following this announcement, HP sued Oracle for breach of contract, arguing that Oracle had violated conditions imposed during settlement over Oracle's hiring of former HP CEO Mark Hurd as its co-CEO, requiring the vendor to support Itanium on its software "until such time as HP discontinues the sales of its Itanium-based servers", and that the breach had harmed its business.
In 2012, a court ruled in favor of HP, and ordered Oracle to resume its support for Itanium.
In June 2016, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (the corporate successor to HP's server business) was awarded $3 billion in damages from the lawsuit.

A former Intel official reported that the Itanium business had become profitable for Intel in late 2009.
By 2009, the chip was almost entirely deployed on servers made by HP, which had over 95% of the Itanium server market share, making the main operating system for Itanium HP-UX.
On March 22, 2011, Intel reaffirmed its commitment to Itanium with multiple generations of chips in development and on schedule.
When first released in 2001, Itanium's performance was disappointing compared to better-established RISC and CISC processors. Emulation to run existing x86 applications and operating systems was particularly poor, with one benchmark in 2001 reporting that it was equivalent at best to a 100 MHz Pentium in this mode (1.1 GHz Pentiums were on the market at that time).
Itanium failed to make significant inroads against IA-32 or RISC, and suffered further following the arrival of x86-64 systems which offered greater compatibility with older x86 applications.
In a 2009 article on the history of the processor — "How the Itanium Killed the Computer Industry" — journalist John C. Dvorak reported "This continues to be one of the great fiascos of the last 50 years". Tech columnist Ashlee Vance commented that the delays and underperformance "turned the product into a joke in the chip industry". In an interview, Donald Knuth said "The Itanium approach...was supposed to be so terrific—until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write."
Both Red Hat and Microsoft announced plans to drop Itanium support in their operating systems due to lack of market interest; however, other Linux distributions such as Gentoo and Debian remain available for Itanium. On March 22, 2011, Oracle Corporation announced that it would no longer develop new products for HP-UX on Itanium, although it would continue to provide support for existing products. Following this announcement, HP sued Oracle for breach of contract, arguing that Oracle had violated conditions imposed during settlement over Oracle's hiring of former HP CEO Mark Hurd as its co-CEO, requiring the vendor to support Itanium on its software "until such time as HP discontinues the sales of its Itanium-based servers", and that the breach had harmed its business. In 2012, a court ruled in favor of HP, and ordered Oracle to resume its support for Itanium. In June 2016, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (the corporate successor to HP's server business) was awarded $3 billion in damages from the lawsuit.
A former Intel official reported that the Itanium business had become profitable for Intel in late 2009. By 2009, the chip was almost entirely deployed on servers made by HP, which had over 95% of the Itanium server market share, making the main operating system for Itanium HP-UX. On March 22, 2011, Intel reaffirmed its commitment to Itanium with multiple generations of chips in development and on schedule.
Itanium