Itanium Mission Statement

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.