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

Improved Parallelism from EPIC

The Itanium architecture uses every practical technique to increase parallelism, or the ability to execute multiple instructions during each machine cycle. Parallelism improves performance because it allows more instructions to be carried out at once. The architecture of the Itanium processor family is designed not only to take advantage of parallelism, but to do it explicitly.

The whole raison d'etre of the EPIC architecture is to make absolutely certain that as many instructions per cycle as possible are executed and to ensure that the compiler has the available resources to sustain this high rate of completion. And although all processors face penalties if an instruction is incorrectly executed or scheduled, ...