Itanium
Hard Drive Recovery - Itanium
Itanium is the brand name of a family of 64-bit microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture, also known as IA-64. Released in June 2001, Itanium processors were designed for use in enterprise servers and high-performance computing systems.
Itanium architecture was originally developed by Hewlett-Packard, and later was jointly developed by HP and Intel. This architecture is based on instruction level parallelism, in which the compiler makes the decisions about which instructions to execute in parallel. This helps Itanium processors execute up to six instructions per clock cycle.
The first Itanium processor, codenamed Merced, was released in 2001. HP now produces the most number of Itanium-based systems, although other manufacturers develop the same. In 2008, Itanium came in fourth place in terms of popularity in enterprise class systems, behind x86-64, IBM POWER and SPARC.
Itanium processors were not a commercial success. Its sales were disastrously beneath expectations. Even at the time of their release, Itanium was no longer superior to contemporary RISC and CISC processors. Intel repositioned Itanium to focus on high-end business and HPC computing. However, its application was limited to replacing PA-RISC in HP systems, Alpha in Compaq systems and MIPS in SGI systems, though IBM also delivered a supercomputer based on this processor.
POWER and SPARC remained strong, while the 32-bit x86 architecture continued to grow into the enterprise space. Only a few thousand systems using the original Merced Itanium processor were sold, due to relatively poor performance, high cost and limited software availability. The fate of Itanium was marked as “one of the great fiascos of the last 50 years.”
