The Itanium is a new processor family and architecture, designed by Intel and Hewlett Packard, with the future of high-end server and workstation computing in mind. The Itanium is big, expensive, complex, and will come with massive internal resources. The Itanium is cutting-edge processor design. The Itanium will use an entirely new form of instruction set called EPIC, which has the potential of bringing unseen levels of parallelism inside a processor. Today, we are going to look at the technical side of the EPIC architecture and the Itanium processor.

The Itanium will gain performance over older processor architectures in many ways: through 64-bit addressing, the Explicit Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC) architecture, a wide parallel execution core, predication, rotating registers, large, fast caches, a high clock speed, scalability, a fast bus architecture, and plenty of execution units.