Introduction To The Intel ® Itanium ® Architecture; Operating Environments - Intel ITANIUM ARCHITECTURE - SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS MANUAL VOLUME 1 REV 2.3 Manual

Introduction to the Intel
Architecture
The Itanium architecture was designed to overcome the performance limitations of
traditional architectures and provide maximum headroom for the future. To achieve
this, the Itanium architecture was designed with an array of innovative features to
extract greater instruction level parallelism including speculation, predication, large
register files, a register stack, advanced branch architecture, and many others. 64-bit
memory addressability was added to meet the increasing large memory footprint
requirements of data warehousing, e-business, and other high performance server
applications. The Itanium architecture has an innovative floating-point architecture and
other enhancements that support the high performance requirements of workstation
applications such as digital content creation, design engineering, and scientific analysis.
The Itanium architecture also provides binary compatibility with the IA-32 instruction
set. Processors based on the Itanium architecture can run IA-32 applications on an
Itanium architecture-based operating system that supports execution of IA-32
applications. Such processors can run IA-32 application binaries on IA-32 legacy
operating systems assuming the platform and firmware support exists in the system.
The Itanium architecture also provides the capability to support mixed IA-32 and
Itanium architecture-based code execution.
2.1

Operating Environments

The architectural model supports a mixture of IA-32 and Itanium architecture-based
applications within a single Itanium architecture-based operating system.
defines the major supported operating environments.
Volume 1, Part 1:Introduction to the Intel
®
® ®
Itanium Architecture
®
Itanium
2
Table 2-1
1:13