@icon_of_computational_sin
What makes you think AXP had anything to do with VLIW? AFAIR they had normal superscalar design and other than Compaq planning to phase Alphas out in favour of Itanium they had nothing to do with each other. Design-wise they are completely unrelated.
Unlike Itanium, they were commercially successful, that is why HP even attempted to revive it and make newer CPUs — that is probably why it outlived Itanium, but then that got sacked too.