The Itanium was quite a ridiculously complex CPU architecture, in my opinion. Quote contrary to the RISC idea of keeping things small and simple.
I've been told that one of the principal engineers behind it at Intel had died unexpectedly half-way, leaving the rest to supposedly misinterpret his ideas and do design by committee, turning it into a bloated mess that I would liken to hardware's counterpart to COBOL.
The Itanium project did leave one lasting legacy though: its standard ABI for C and C++, defining new better ways for doing such things as thread-local storage and table-based exception handling.
It has been so influential that ABI's for CPU's that came after it, including 64-bit x86 and ARM, have patterned theirs after Itanium's, with their documentation sometimes even referring back to the Itanium's.
Explicit parallel instruction computing (EPIC) is far from a dead concept. Most newer CPU and DSP architectures have incorporated it, but with more efficient instruction encoding.