Re: Rolling rolling rolling ... rawhide
"While that's something everyone accepts and "knows" now, it was far from clear in the early 90s when HP began development on PA-RISC 3.0 which became Itanium."
Well, not everyone is a computer architect or designs microprocessor front-ends for a living ... However within that community dynamic scheduling was already recognized as a win by the 70s, perhaps the most famous example of it was the CDC 6600 (released in 1964). Superscalar processors were old hat by the 90s - there was plenty of data out there from the boat-anchor machines to show the benefits (eg: CDC 6600, IBM S/360/370/etc) of dynamic scheduling.
By the late 80s/early 90s superscalar microprocessors had just started appearing and transistor budgets were sky-rocketing year on year with no plateau in sight. So from my PoV in the 90s HP/Intel & EPIC (1997) were very much swimming against the tide - everyone else was going superscalar: AMD 29K (1990), Motorola 88110 (1991), Alpha EV4 (1992), POWER2 (1994), HyperSPARC (1993), MIPS R8000 (1994), AMD K5 (1996), and even the Intel P6 (1995)... Even INMOS had a superscalar hack called the "Grouper" designed for the T9000 in 1990.
I like oddball CPUs and would not have begrudged EPIC some success if it was a good fit for the problem - but that wasn't what I was seeing before or after it's release.