Itanium processor microarchitecture

The Itanium processor is the first implementation of the IA-64 instruction set architecture (ISA). The design team optimized the processor to meet a wide range of requirements: high performance on Internet servers and workstations, support for 64-bit addressing, reliability for mission-critical applications, full IA-32 instruction set compatibility in hardware, and scalability across a range of operating systems and platforms. The processor employs EPIC (explicitly parallel instruction computing) design concepts for a tighter coupling between hardware and software. In this design style the hardware-software interface lets the software exploit all available compilation time information and efficiently deliver this information to the hardware. It addresses several fundamental performance bottlenecks in modern computers, such as memory latency, memory address disambiguation, and control flow dependencies.