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

Chapter 10. The Transition Process

“That Itanium…provides a fairly linear improvement path [is due to its] use of massive explicit parallelism. We're still trying to figure out the quantification of that performance jump. And several people have told me that this jump is a multiple—two times faster, three times faster, four times faster.:

—Jerry Huck

In this Chapter:

• Toward transitioning to Itanium

• The five phases of the Itanium transition process

• Planning phase

• Porting and transition

• Implementation support

• Hardware and software

• Education

The Itanium implementation of Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC) technology combines the concepts of explicit parallelism, predication, and speculation to progress well beyond the limitations of traditional ...