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Definition
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". 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). In modern Processors,including
Itanium,a multiplicity of arithmetic-logic or floating-point on-chip units execute
several instructions in parallel.Ideally,increasing the number of execution units
should increas the number of extra instructions per clock cycle proportionally.But
conventional processors also needs a lot of extra on-chip circuitry to schedule
and track the instruction progress,which takes up valuable space,consumes power
and add steps to the execution process. As a result only a slight improvement
in the number of instructions per clock cycle occurs when the number of execution
units are increased.Instead EPIC architects use a compiler to schedule instructions.
An excellent scheduler ,it makes parallelism explicit to th processor.It
bundles instructions into 128-bit packets containing up to three instructions
plus information about the interdependencies.Less scheduling and tracking circuitry
is needed on the chip and the extra information in each bundle allows the architecture
to be scalable so that programs compiled for todays itanium systems will not need
recompilation for future generations of the chip ITANIUM PROCESSOR FAMILY 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 to demand greater
application performance,due to the following developments: "
Increased users and demand(internet) " Higher bandwidth tasks(streaming)
" Requirements for secure processing(SSL) " Larger hardware requirements(Very
Large Data Bases) " Support for multi-OS environments(virtual data center,computing
as a utility) 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. 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.some of
the features that this processor brings to the follow below: "
Floating-point performance for compute intensive applications " EPIC
technology for maximum parallelism &HW\SW synergy " Scalability from
1-way to128-way+ " 64-bit addressing and high bandwidth
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