I should've been more clear: Most open source projects, or my projects for the customers I used to have, can't/couldn't rely on a DSP chip or card being installed. If Itanium had gone mainstream, I could've counted on it's VLIW instructions.

We can /almost/ count on a GPU nowadays, but programming in Cuda ties you to NVidia, and OpenCL doesn't seem to have taken off the same way.

> Perhaps Itanium would have made a good DSP but it wasn't really aimed at that market

I suspect there are a lot of FFTs, SVDs, and large matrix multiplies in software now. Deep learning, convolutional nets, image and audio algorithms, TikTok "filters", and so on. Of course there was almost none of that on desktops in the late 90s.