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

Itanium Processor Register Set Model

The EPIC architecture upon which the Itanium processor is based allows for a large number of registers. The 128 floating-point registers combine both fixed and rotating registers. The rotating registers are normally used for software pipelining loops to greatly speed up loop execution. This allows the encoding of common algorithms without running the risk of depleting the available register space. It also allows you to move data between registers without having to resort to complex tricks that slow the processor down.

The Itanium microprocessor's large register set provides a place to store intermediate results during complex calculations. Latency is reduced, as going back to on-chip cache or the off-chip ...