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

Chapter 7. EPIC—The Appropriate Name for a Breakthrough in Processor Architecture

“Hewlett Packard was very involved with RISC, and that led to the development with Intel of this architecture called EPIC. And then from EPIC, Intel drew the blueprint and built the chip, now HP is building the systems. Kind of like the architects and the builders working together if you will...”

—Mark Hudson, HP Marketing Director

In this Chapter:

• EPIC is different than RISC

• RISC's Limitations in Parallel Processing

• Squaring Overhead

• Explicit Parallelism

• Itanium Register Set Model

• Floating Point Architecture

When you talk about an architecture, you're really discussing how the microprocessor itself is organized. With Intel, we developed an 'instruction set architecture' ...