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Itanium
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A full discussion of Itanium micro architecture features is out of the scope of this article, but a brief summary is in order. At this point, the architecture is most notable for what most sets it apart from the legacy of IA32, a 64-bit address space. In other respects too, it's a very different beast. The compiler plays a larger performance role. The new instruction set was designed for high exposure of instruction level parallelism (ILP), and the compiler exposes this parallelism. Itanium2®-based implementations have been designed with very large and fast caches, to the benefit of server applications.
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While HP is perceived as betting the 64-bit farm on Intel’s Itanium, IBM and Sun are not. Last month, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Intel’s rival, launched its new Opteron processor that goes up against Itanium in handling large amounts of memory effectively. On the same day of the AMD launch, IBM announced it was selling Opteron-based computing clusters. But the battle lines, while being drawn, are not between Itanium and Opteron, says Haff.
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Itanium architecture implementations have the richest set of performance counters on any Intel architecture. These counters allow developers to quickly determine the exact cause of performance bottlenecks using tools like Intel's VTune Performance Analyzer tool. In fact, the Microsoft SQL group identified and eliminated performance bottlenecks with Itanium processor counters that have long existed in SQL source code, unable to be exposed in any other way.
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With the growing market success of Itanium 2-based solutions and the integration of 64-bit extensions into x86-based processors, organizations now have a choice of two widely supported, industry-standard, 64-bit architectures. Which is the right choice for your data center? Click here.
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With the release of the Intel Itanium 2 processor 1.60 GHz with 9MB L3 cache, the Itanium architecture offers new levels of compute-parallelism that bring premier performance to enterprise and technical computing. The Itanium 2 processor established a broad series of exceptional performance records, and led a vast growth in the Itanium 2 architecture ecosystem. This new processor is hardware and software compatible with existing Itanium 2-based solutions, and is up to 25%1 faster than its predecessor. Customers can expect 5-15% performance boost using existing systems and applications. Intel's new IA-32 Execution Layer technology further enhances software compatibility, because all Itanium 2 processors offer support for IA-32 applications.
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An Itanium-based computer first appeared on list of the TOP500 supercomputers in November 2001[14]. The best position ever achieved by an Itanium 2 based system in the list was #2, achieved in June 2004, when Thunder (LLNL) entered the list with an Rmax of 19.94 Teraflops. In November 2004, Columbia entered the list at #2 with 51.8 Teraflops, and there was at least one Itanium-based computer in the top 10 from then until June 2007. The peak number of Itanium-based machines on the list occurred in the November 2004 list, at 16.8%; in November 2007, this was 4.2%.[39]
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