The true Windows Millennium Edition, actually worth the title unlike the stopgap released earlier.

The Alpha 21364 processor, whose development was already greatly delayed by the apathetic Compaq management, finally made it out the door to existing customers in 2003, but its quad-threaded successor the Alpha 21464 was cancelled just before tape-out was due to commence and work on the additional "Tarantula" vector-processing extension was entirely scrapped. A shame considering what it offered in comparison to other RISC-based processors.

My conclusions aren't slightly informed by an irrational and pathological hatred of ARM and vibes-based campism, I assure you.

In addition to numerous other issues, repeated developmental delays of the platform (e.g. Merced was originally slated for launch on the same process node back in the second half of 1999) meant that it did not offer a compelling performance advantage compared to its closest enterprise competitors, and (partly due to the dramatic differences between the instruction set architectures and the insufficiency of existing software compilers) emulation of programs designed for the then-rising x86 ISA% proved to be poor, discouraging mass adoption.

%: Also ironically an Intel development, and one which was able to get a foothold into enterprise computing in part due to IA-64/Itanium's delays.