Chapter 2. The Itanium Processor Family: The Next Generation of Processor Architecture

“There's not a single advantage to Itanium. There's a set of advantages that lead you to want to use it. Business advantages, technology advantages...it's a 64-bit architecture and that's going to be very important to the positioning of [an Itanium-based system] as a high-end server platform. And then...you give somebody 64 gigabytes or more of memory, they'll use it.”

—Jerry Huck, Lead HP Architect on the Itanium Project

In this Chapter:

• The Need for Itanium Power

• Development of Early Architectures

• PA-RISC

• Beyond Megahertz = Speed

• Moore's Second Law and how Itanium Suspends It

Jerry Huck, one of Hewlett-Packard's designers behind the creation of the Intel^® Itanium^® Processor family,^[3] holds the opinion that the development of the chip's architecture embodies the third great wave of innovation in the field of microprocessor design. Far from being alone in this opinion, he's actually in very good company with several of the leading lights in his area of expertise. John Crawford, an Intel Fellow, shared the platform with him at the October 1997 Microprocessor Forum and described the coming chip as one that could crunch data in 64-bit chunks at a time, as opposed to 32 for the then dominant Intel^® Pentium^® processor.

^[3] Intel, Itanium, and Pentium are registered trademarks or trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.

It would be tempting to mistake the coming Intel Itanium architecture—and its the entire family of processors slated for release in the coming months—as yet another high-end processor. Yet the development of the Itanium processor is more than a simple line extension. As a product, the Itanium processor is the chip platform that will enable HP and Intel to stand out as a technology pioneers in an industry that is rapidly falling victim to mass commoditization. The reasons have to do with the explosive growth and demands placed on servers in the information technology arena, the evolving need for more efficient processor architecture, and a profound shift in the way computing is being viewed in both the academic and corporate arena.