The Itanium brand extends Intel’s reach into the highest
level of computing enabling powerful servers and high- performance workstations
to address the increasing demands that the internet economy places on
e-business. The Itanium architecture is a unique combination of innovative
features, such as explicit parallelism, predication, speculation and much more.
In addition to providing much more memory that today’s 32-bit
designs, the 64-bit architecture changes the way the processor hardware
interacts with code. The Itanium is geared toward increasingly power-hungry
applications like e-commerce security, computer-aided design and scientific
modeling.
Intel said the Itanium provides a 12-fold performance
improvement over today’s 32-bit designs. Its “Explicitly Parallel Instruction
Computing”(EPIC) technology enables it to handle parallel processing
differently than previous architectures, most of which were designed 10 to 20
years ago. The technology reduces hardware complexity to better enable
processor speed upgrades. Itanium processors contain “massive chip execution
resources”, that allow “breakthrough capabilities in processing terabytes of
data”.
Here a sincere attempt is made to explore the architecture
feature and performance characteristic of Itanium processor. A brief
explanation on the system environment and their computing applications is also
undertaken.
INTRODUCTION
The Itanium processor family came about for several reasons, but the primary one was that the processor architecture advances of RISC were no longer growing at the rate seen in the 1980’s or the 1990’s.Yet,customers continued demand greater application performance.
The Itanium processor family was developed as a response to address the future performance and growth needs of business, technical and scientific users with greater flexibility, better performance and a much greater ‘bang for the buck’ in the price performance arena. Itanium is the first processor to use EPIC(Explicit Parallel Instruction Computing) architecture. Its performance is to be better than the present day Reduced Instruction Set Computing and Complex Instruction Set Computing(RISC & CISC).
The Itanium architecture achieves a more difficult goal than a processor that could have been designed with ‘price as no object’. Rather, it delivers near-peerless speed at a price that is sustainable by the mainstream corporate market.
