The Apache #’s pretty much give the game away: An Itanium clocked 50% higher was losing to a 2yo Alpha by about 20% on throughput at peak.
VLIW made sense when Intel wanted to win the FP-heavy workstation market. But while it was in development, integer-heavy web workloads became dominant and that was basically the ballgame.
The world would be much nicer if we still had new Alpha CPUs. It was intended to be a CPU architecture that lasts 25 years and Digital intended the architecture to support a 1000x increase in performance during that time.
Now we have RISC-V reinventing the wheel. Not the worst outcome, but we could have had it so much better...