The Itanium Processor Family: Built on Two Impressive Legacies
At the heart of this next wave in computing power is the next generation of computing architectures, the Intel® Itanium® processor family. This was the result of a joint development project between Hewlett-Packard and Intel®[8] Corporation. Intel, with its four-fifths share of the PC microprocessor market and proven ability in microprocessor design and volume production, was a key partner in the project. Hewlett-Packard, also one of the top five producers of microprocessors, came with a slightly different skill set. HP's direction was from the more high value workstation- and server-centric side.
[8] Intel, Itanium, and Pentium are registered trademarks or trademarks of Intel Corporation in the United States and other countries.
In fact, HP's approach brought unique strengths to this project. There was already a synergy to build on—the PA-RISC architecture and Hewlett-Packard's own flavor of UNIX, HP-UX. PA-RISC was the first form of the RISC architecture that was widely available commercially. PA-RISC, with its simpler instruction set that allowed one or more complete instructions to be executed on a single clock cycle, exhibited a significant performance gain over existing architectures at the time.
HP-UX was the first flavor of UNIX to feature significant commercial application support. HP-UX, particularly HP-UX 11i, perfectly complements the use of the PA-RISC architecture by providing stability and scalability—allowing PA-RISC to work to its maximum capability in the enterprise environment.
Several forces contributed to and enhanced the creation of the Intel Itanium architecture. The reasons for its development stemmed from more than a reaction to the market forces driving the need for more sophisticated forms of computing. At work was the highly successful long-term strategy that HP formulated in the 1990's.
You'll learn about how Hewlett-Packard, together with Intel, determined which direction the next generation of architecture was going to take. You'll also see why this collaboration has yielded the next generation of processor architecture, driven by the collective abilities of the best minds in the field. And finally, you'll start to see how it will move enterprises and partners into the forefront of this technological revolution.