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Why Itanium® Architecture?

Intel® Itanium® processor family architecture will greatly increase the performance and functionality of today's most demanding applications including e-Business, visualization, computation and multimedia operations. The Intel Itanium processor family has been designed to enable server environments that are more responsive, extremely customizable and highly available. The performance enhancements offered by Intel Itanium processors include:

  • More efficient memory utilization
  • Better system tuning
  • Increased platform reliability
  • Improved scalability

Intel® Itanium® processor: Your Solution for the Internet Economy

The Internet is having a profound impact on the way you do business. In the future, your measure of success will be the ability to deliver and integrate information on the customers' terms, delivering what they want, where they want, when they want, and in the form they want. The nature of the Internet means the choices are vast and the customer, not the vendor, is king.

In thinking about how e-Business will impact the data center, consider the following:

  • There is a shift from vendor-centric to customer-centric focus
  • There is increased competition and lower barriers to entry
  • Cycle times for products and services are shrinking dramatically
  • Business the computing services must be available all the time with the highest levels of service availability
  • More business processes are automated and integrated to replace phones, fax, mail, and human interaction
  • There is an increasing level of data delivery and more extensive data integration inside and outside a company

From a technical perspective, systems must support orders of magnitude more simultaneous users, real time data analysis, seamless security and transaction management, integrate multiple data sources, all while ensuring continuous uptime. Server hardware must provide processing power, memory addressability, scalable I/O and availability to handle these growing demands.

The Intel® Itanium® processor is built on a new architecture which has the headroom to deliver the performance and scalability needs of e-Business computing for the next 25 years. It is uniquely designed to meet the specific needs of the server segment by delivering availability, performance and scalability for enterprise class applications.

The foundation of Intel Itanium architecture, based on the Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC) technology along with 64-bit addressability, provides the power to meet the e-Business challenge at the highest ends of the enterprise. Architecture features such as predication, speculation and parallelism improve application performance and form the foundation to meet the evolving, unpredictable demands of e-Business. The Itanium processor design includes IA-32 instruction level compatibility in hardware to provide investment protection for currently deployed applications.

Many operating systems vendors have committed to delivering and supporting Itanium-based servers. The breadth of OS choice combined with a variety of multiprocessor server platforms allows you to deploy solutions with the right OS for the job, that scale with the demands of your applications. Applications for the Intel Itanium processor range from Front-end to Mid-tier, to Back-end, and include:

  • Internet infrastructure such as caching, security, and directory services
  • Application services to support customer relationship management, catalog, application development, and scientific/engineering
  • Database services and business intelligence applications like data warehousing, data mining, online analytical processing and DBMS systems

The industry momentum behind the Intel Itanium processor family is more than any other processor launched in Intel history. Intel is working in concert with the computing industry to deliver comprehensive server solutions, beginning with the platforms and hardware, up through the operating systems and software applications, and into the services and support necessary for complete solutions.

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