02-01-2013, 04:08 PM
Intel Itanium Processor Abstract
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ABSTRACT
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.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, reduce hardware complexity to better enable processor speed upgrades.Itanium processors contain "massive chip execution resources", that allow "breakthrough capabilities in processing terabytes of data. 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 increase the number of extra instructions per clock cycle proportionally. Butconventional processors also need on-chip circuitry to schedule and track the instruction progress, which takes up valuable space. As a result only a slight improvement in the number of instructions per clock cycle occurs when the number of execution units isincreased. Instead EPIC architects use a compiler to schedule instructions.