Reasons for Itanium^®-based Platform Value

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 table follow below. Other reasons, such as the parallel architecture, are important enough to discuss in their own separate sections in this chapter, which follow.

• Floating-point performance for compute intensive applications

• EPIC technology for maximum parallelism & HW/SW synergy

• Scalability from 1-way to 128-way+

• 64-bit addressing and high bandwidth