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

Computing as a Utility

The three-tiered system is certainly one that works, but it is still centered on what kind of hardware investment an organization can make. This is why a great deal of thought during the Intel Itanium architecture development process went into how we wanted to shape computing for the decade after the millennium. The idea that came out of the lab is for a much different kind of computing capability than exists today.

The umbrella concept is to shift the idea of computing as a hardware purchase to one as a service purchase. Several original principles underlay the use of Itanium power to shift computing into this new paradigm—the paradigm of computing as a utility. Each principle was incorporated into the design capabilities ...