Chapter 10. The Transition Process

“That Itanium…provides a fairly linear improvement path [is due to its] use of massive explicit parallelism. We're still trying to figure out the quantification of that performance jump. And several people have told me that this jump is a multiple—two times faster, three times faster, four times faster.:

—Jerry Huck

In this Chapter:

• Toward transitioning to Itanium

• The five phases of the Itanium transition process

• Planning phase

• Porting and transition

• Implementation support

• Hardware and software

• Education

The Itanium implementation of Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC) technology combines the concepts of explicit parallelism, predication, and speculation to progress well beyond the limitations of traditional architectures. This will enable industry-leading performance far into the future.

Itanium is the first mainstream architecture designed from the beginning to take advantage of parallel execution. With its massive resources, inherent scalability, and full compatibility, the Intel Itanium processor family^[24] will be the ideal next-generation processor architecture for high-performance servers and workstations. See Figure 10-1 for a full table list of details.

^[24] Intel and Itanium are registered trademarks or trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.