Chapter 18. The Future of EPIC Processors and Systems
“If what you really need is the greatest scalability, the greatest future growth, the greatest performance and capacity in systems, Itanium will pull into the lead.”
—Bill Worley
“Any form of technology, if sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic.”
—Arthur C. Clarke
In This Chapter:
Fixed-issue machines
As we look ahead, there are really two directions that Hewlett-Packard and Intel are heading toward, due in large part to the development of the Intel Itanium processor family architecture.[42] One is a drive towards more performance—pushing the envelope and getting even more parallelism and more actions to be taken with every clock cycle of the CPU.
[42] Intel and Itanium are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.
The other direction is driven less by technology and more by business economics. Other members of the Intel Itanium processor family will be created with an eye on filling out the marketplace by providing lower power consumption and lower cost members for applications that may not have the need for top speed. Instead, these chips will skew towards providing maximum value per dollar spent and maximizing the mips/watt of power consumed.
These two directions in turn are influenced by items that Itanium users in the enterprise computing environments would find important, which include:
High reliability
High availability
Security