Itanium processors

Increased users, demand on internet, secure processing, larger hardware requirements because of all these reasons the Itanium processors was introduced in June 2008. The Itanium processor is a new processor family designed by Intel and Hewlett Packard. It was developed for better performance and growth needs of business. But these processors are much greater ‘bang for the buck’ in the price-performance arena.

The Itanium is very expensive, and complex. It will come with massive internal resources. The Itanium is cutting-edge processor design. The Itanium architecture was designed for the new industry in high performance processor architecture for the next twenty years.

This Itanium processor architecture has been renamed several times during its history. HP originally uses to call “PA-WIDEWORD”. Intel later called it as “IA-64″. The performance boost in “IA-64″ is due to a handful of new technologies which is known as “EPIC” -Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing. This new latest technology developed by both Intel and HP. It is a 64-Bit register, high explicitly, parallel architecture. The base data word is 64 bits, Byte-addressable.

The IA is the part of the processor that fetches instructions and the registers, which are high speed memory locations that process number of bits of data at a time. The architecture implements speculation and branch prediction. This Itanium processor designed for high performance computing, scientific, and technical and business applications.

This “IA-64 bit” processor architecture contains 128 integer registers, 128 floating point registers,64 one bit predicates and 8 branch registers.

Features of IA-64 architecture

-Branch architecture

-Control and data speculation

-data types, memory and registers

-Floating point architecture

-Integer architecture

-Software pipelining

In this architecture of Itanium processor Each 128-bit instruction word contains three instructions and the fetching mechanism can read up to two instruction words per clock from the cache into the pipe line. The processor has thirty functional execution units in eleven groups, each unit can execute a particular subset of the instruction set, and each unit executes at a rate of one instruction per cycle unless execution stalls waiting for data.

These new Itanium processors are developed for workstations systems and servers. These are intended to support future demands of the internet, business applications, and intensive high-end graphics programs. Itanium is supported by windows server 2003, 2008, multiple Linux distributions and HPUX. HP also sells a technology for Itanium called Integrity virtual machines. Itanium also supports mainframe environment.

“The best simplest way to describe the mission statement for the Itanium family is creation of an architecture that can address future e-business needs with the best price, best performance and flexibility”.