IA-64 Article

What comes with the new IA-64 technology?

As new applications that require more of our computers emerges so will it put more and more load on our cpu's. As 3D graphics is being used more and more so will the need for an cpu and a graphiccard that can handle these heavy loads on our computers. If someone has tried to play a game like Quake 2 with full graphics on a Pentium 120 with a 3Dblaster so can you probably see what I mean.

At these times Intel is the leader in producing the newest cpus and the other companies that produce cpus has a hard time to produce cpus that can compete with Intel. While the performance of today´s processors continues to improve from day to day so will the existing architectures based on an out-of-order execution model require increasingly complex hardware mechanisms and are increasingly impeded by performance limiters such as branches and memory latency.

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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