Reasons for Itanium's Outstanding Performance

From the start, the Itanium processor family architecture was designed to be particularly strong at mathematical processes such as floating-point calculations. (For more details on the Itanium processor's strengths in this area, see Chapter 2). Specifically, the heavy lifting of a large integer processor family includes 64-bit capabilities, improved floating-point performance, large register set, and explicitly parallel design. These features enable Itanium processors to efficiently process cryptographic operations on-chip.

This on-chip performance far outstrips an external cryptographic processor. Because an external processor would live “off the board,” it would always have the disadvantage of having an additional communications bottleneck communicating with the primary processor.

In addition, the Itanium processor benefits from its architecture's ability to multiply efficiently. This ability is directly related to the SSL transaction rate. The expanded number of registers, pipelining, and reduced latency all play into the transaction rate increase. Furthermore, the processor clock rate directly scales with the SSL transaction rate. For example, a 550-MHz processor was found to be about 25 percent faster at SSL transactions than a 440-MHz processor of the same architecture.

Finally, the UNIX-based HP-UX 11i operating environment and associated software and Zeus Web Server act to project Itanium speed and power for security purposes. In each case, they have been tuned to eliminate bottlenecks that would prevent the performance power of the Itanium from reaching the user application.