IMO Intel have always built shitty CPU architectures and exaggerated their capabilities. The i860 billed as a "Cray on a chip" - superpipelined but you had to hand-tune the assembler for max performance to avoid pipeline stall and it had to dump/restore so much state on a context switch it was basically unusable for multi-tasking and ended up as a graphics processor. Itanic failed to live up to expectations - very long instruction word needed advanced compiler technology (you thought they'd have learned). ix86 programming manual claimed it had "general purpose registers" - err, bollocks, not like the clean, orthogonal 68000 series or VAX so you have to hit the stack/cache shuffling operands into the right registers. ix86 is a bag on the side of a bag on the side of a bag of shit, sustained only by heroic feats of engineering. A decent alternative at a reasonable price (RISC-V?) can't come soon enough. </rant>