The Merced that will arrive sometime in
year 2000 will use Intel's IA-64 processor architecture and the improvement from todays
Pentium II or Xeon machines will probably be magnificant. Built on the breath and depth of
the IA-32 processors will the IA-64 architecture provide additional performance headroom
and scalability needed for the futures 3D applications that will come. The IA-64
architecture features a revolutionary 64-bit instruction set architecture which applies a
new processor architecture technology called Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing
(EPIC).
EPIC has been developed together with
Hewlett Packard and will probably bring new levels of parallelism far above the sequential
execution paradigm that exists with traditional architectures as EPIC embodies a set of
advanced computer architecture techniques such as explicit parallelism, predication, and
speculation. These techniques, as applied to Intel's IA-64 architecture, enable a much
higher degree of instruction-level parallelism, and enable IA-64 processors to execute
more instructions per clock cycle to deliver better performance then today's RISC
processors.
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