Itanium Rising: Breaking Through Moore's Second Law of Computing Power

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 ...