Itanium

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Die shot of Itanium 9500 [1] Itanium,

a family of 64-bit microprocessors by Intel that implement the IA-64 architecture originated by Hewlett-Packard (HP) and later jointly developed by HP and Intel. While the early development started in 1989 by HP, Intel officially announced the name of the processor, Itanium, on October 4, 1999 [2]. The Itanium Merced was released on June 2001, Itanium 2 McKinley and Madison in 2002 and 2003 respectively, the so far most recent Poulson (Itanium 9500) in November 2012, and Kittson planned for 2015 [3]. Initially intended as Intel’s successor for x86 aka IA-32 architecture, AMD forced Intel to change priorities with x86-64.

x86 Support

x86 (IA-32) instructions were supported by hardware [5] , and since 2006 emulated with the IA-32 Execution Layer.

Chess Programs

TSCP [6] , Tinker [7] and Crafty were mentioned running under Itanium. While the original Merced was disappointing, Robert Hyatt reported a good performance of Crafty on McKinley in 2003 [8] , close to the Opteron with double frequency. Eugene Nalimov, at that time member of the Microsoft Visual compiler team targeting the Itanium platform, provided a IA-64 optimzed BitScan aka firstOne and lastOne in C [9] , taking advantage of IA-64’s branch predication.

See also

Forum Posts

References

  1. Intel’s Next Generation Itanium ‘Kittson’ IA64 Processor Detailed - 32nm Process, 9300/9500 Socket Compatible by Usman Pirzada, April 2015
  2. Intel names Merced chip Itanium - CNET News by Michael Kanellos, CNET News, October 4, 1999
  3. Itanium from Wikipedia
  4. Diagram of the architecture of the Itanium (IA-64) 64-bit Intel microprocessor, Image by Fred the Oyster, September 08, 2014, Wikimedia Commons, IA-64 from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
  5. Re: Deep-Fritz 18 on a 64 cpu itanium (intel not AMD) system by Eugene Nalimov, CCC, January 16, 2003
  6. Re: Question: Itanium Info by K. Burcham, CCC, December 08, 2003
  7. Itanium2 Testing Crafty & Tinker Informal Results by Brian Richardson, CCC, February 16, 2003
  8. Re: Question: Itanium Info by Robert Hyatt, CCC, December 09, 2003
  9. Re: Will the Itanium have a BSF or BSR instruction? by Eugene Nalimov, CCC, August 16, 2000

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