Problems with Today's Processors

Today, 32-bit servers or proprietary 64-bit RISC servers are the norm. They have respectable price/performance ratios but are either fundamentally limited in performance scalability or are exceedingly expensive.

Servers based on the Intel-architecture 32-bit (IA-32) processors, for example, are unable to address large amounts of memory. Meanwhile, 64-bit RISC architectures have the necessary performance and addressing, but they are more expensive and generally lock the customer into a proprietary operating environment and a single computer vendor.

End users and IT professionals alike are clamoring for high performance and large addressing at an economical price. And they also are asking for pervasiveness so that they do not have to deal with multiple architectures and complexity.

HP and Intel co-developed the Itanium processor family architecture. The result is a high-performance, parallel 64-bit architecture that has the performance headroom to grow in the future and can be priced at a level to ensure its widespread adoption. The Itanium architecture fulfills both of these promises and is likely to become pervasive very quickly.