I never used them but my understanding is that the performance was solid - but in a market with incumbents you don't just need to be as good as them you need to be significantly better or significantly cheaper. My sense was that it met expectations but that it wasn't enough for people to switch over.
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Merced (first generation Itanium) had hilariously bad performance, and its built in "x86 support" was even slower.
HP-designed later cores were much faster and omitted x86 hardware support replacing it with software emulation if needed, but ultimately IA-64 rarely ever ran with good performance as far as I know.
Pretty sure it was Itanium that finally turned "Sufficiently Smart Compiler" into curse phrase as it is understood today, and definitely popularized it.