The Intel® Itanium® processor, first in the family of 64-bit Itanium architecture products from Intel, is targeted at the most demanding enterprise computing and technical applications. The Intel Itanium processor raises the bar for workstation systems by delivering new levels of performance and capabilities for the most demanding memory and floating-point intensive workstation applications. With the Internet providing instant data delivery worldwide, businesses are seeking ways to speed design times and boost productivity ahead of the competition. Applications in areas such as digital content creation (DCC), financial modeling, business intelligence, scientific and medical data analysis, and mechanical computer aided engineering (MCAE) play a key role in these efforts. At the same time, the constant increase in available compute power has spawned workstation applications and designs that are more complex than almost anything seen in years past.
The Itanium architecture marks a new era for Enterprise Computing and Technical Applications with its combination of Explicitly Parallel Instruction Processing (EPIC) technology and 64-bit computational capabilities. This revolutionary new architecture, combining increased memory and I/O bandwidth, parallelism, massive register sets, and large memory addressability, delivers world-class floating-point performance for workstation and scientific applications.
Even as companies contend with a power crunch at the high end, they face thorny platform issues across the enterprise. Traditionally, IT departments have maintained dedicated workstation platforms requiring redundant system and application deployments, additional management, and increased complexity. Those solutions begin to fall apart when design teams are dispersed and collaboration and data sharing occur over the Internet. Today, companies need to integrate the full functionality of the corporate network and communications infrastructure into the workstation -- or risk losing access to vital skills and resources.
Itanium-based platforms are designed to deliver new capabilities for high-end workstation computing while aligning within existing corporate networks. These systems extend the open computing model to high-end workstation environments, thus delivering greater choice and superior price/performance over proprietary RISC-based architectures. Introduction of Itanium-based workstation systems by multiple major OEMs are expected to begin in June '01 to August '01 timeframe.
The Itanium Difference
The Itanium processor combines high availability and scalability
features to provide the optimum enterprise solution for high-end
workstations. The Itanium processor features an optimized design that
vastly increases main memory access, thus allowing truly massive
programs and data sets to reside in fast system memory for computation.
The result goes beyond improved performance. On current workstations,
extremely complex undertakings, such as aircraft and chip design, often
must be parsed into multiple files. However, the Itanium processor
enables designers to work on a single, massive model that reduces the
complexity and provides a clearer overall view of the project.
Of course, performance is paramount in the workstation arena. The Itanium processor employs groundbreaking EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing) technology to maximize parallelism (executing more instructions per clock than traditional architectures) and to take advantage of optimized compiler code. Parallelism allows the system to deliver higher performance and scalability by enabling the compiler to provide more information to the processor. The result: Itanium-based workstations are able to execute many operations simultaneously on a sustained basis. Fine control over memory accesses, computation order, and other program aspects ensure that Itanium-based workstations operate at peak efficiency. Itanium systems also deliver world-class floating-point performance (6.4 GFLOPS max) for technical compute-intensive applications. This further improves the performance of precision calculations in areas such as fluid and chemical models analysis. A balanced system design keeps data moving smoothly around the processor. The first Itanium-based workstations feature 4.2 GB/s of memory bandwidth to provide rapid access to data. Support for symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) operation--ranging from two to 64+ processors--provides ample scalability. Itanium-based workstations with 2.1 GB/s of external I/O bandwidth enable powerful clusters to be built using off-the-shelf parts.
Corporate Citizens
One of the biggest problems with traditional workstation deployments has
been the cost of procuring hardware. Workstations based on Intel®
Pentium® III Xeon™ and the new Intel® Xeon™ processors have broken
down those barriers, thus enabling companies to deploy workstations to
all who need them. The Itanium processor extends the price/performance
leadership of the Intel architecture to the most demanding arenas of
workstation computing.
The result is an end-to-end workstation platform that makes it possible to integrate workstation tasks into business operations. Businesses that need to accomplish daunting technical computations can do so, while meshing those high-end workstations seamlessly with the more affordable systems employed by other engineers and managers. IT departments can avoid costly multi-platform deployments by utilizing Intel architecture solutions across the enterprise while enabling network-based collaboration for higher productivity.
Corporations can also look to the significant benefits that the open computing model of the Itanium platform brings when compared to proprietary platform models. Itanium platforms provide the choice of leading systems vendors, enterprise-class operating systems, and hundreds of enterprise and technical applications. The result: Companies can seek best-fit solutions, rather than be constrained by the limited choice of a proprietary platform.
Moving to Itanium
The shift to Itanium-based workstations is well underway. Independent
software vendors are porting over 400 applications to the Itanium
processor, and Intel is working actively with the software community to
help optimize code. Intel's Application Solution Centers, for example,
provide services like technical consulting, benchmarking, and code
analysis to ISVs who will help ensure that Itanium-optimized
applications take full advantage of the new processor design.
The benefits of choice extend beyond applications. In addition to Microsoft Windows XP 64-bit Edition, companies will be able to run HP-UX* 11i v1.5 and Linux* operating systems on Itanium-based workstations. They will also find Itanium-based systems offered by more than two dozen OEMs. The strong support from such a large community of vendors means that end-users will have maximum flexibility and choice in configuring an Itanium-based solution for their specific need.