Poulson Intel 50mb cache CPU

[jhu]

But those games require OpenGL accelerating hardware, which is hardly available for the Itanium platform right? On second thought, so does Minecraft (although in that case it's through some Java library implementation of OpenGL). I wonder if there's any OpenGL software renderer for Itanium?

Mesa is open source, so just recompile or run Debian.

In fairness though, in the SPECfp numbers you linked to there are also several tests where the Itanium system is much faster than the x86 one.

It all depends on the work load that you'll run on the cmputer. Image rendering with Povray isn't Itanium's strong point (and probably not Yafray or Blender either); actually, I don't even know if there are any non-open source image rendering programs for Itanium that are still supported.