In Summary

• The Itanium architecture was developed to meet and exceed future performance and growth needs of enterprise business, technical, and scientific users with greater flexibility and future headroom. The idea was to create an architecture capable of greater speed and also unbeatable price-performance.

• The Intel Itanium processor is faster than most of the present day competition. And, with future compiler improvements and newer chip designs, it will outpace all other existing architectures.

• No matter if you run RISC or IA-32 based systems, you'll still be able to reap performance gains from Itanium-based systems.

• An Itanium-based platform also provides superior performance in all three areas of 'RAS': 'Reliability—Availability—Serviceability'.

• The Itanium processor uses EPIC, or explicitly parallels instruction computing architecture. This allows a system to go from one instruction per cycle to 6 or even more instructions per cycle.

• Investment protection was another goal of Itanium-based solutions. The triple protection that Itanium-based systems offer is for legacy software, legacy hardware, and legacy data. This is due in part to Itanium's ability to work with almost any operating system and application.

• Enterprise computing is an ideal place for Itanium power. By improving upon capabilities of today's architectures, Itanium can ensure flexibility and choice in the enterprise environment.