Intel® Itanium® processor
The Intel® Itanium® processor family provides the foundation for mainframe-class computing systems that offers greater flexibility and better cost models than traditional mainframe and high-end RISC systems. Itanium®-based servers deliver powerful and scalable performance for UNIX and mainframe environments, along with world-class availability for your most mission-critical applications.
Overview
Because Itanium processors are available in commercial off-the-shelf hardware from a rich ecosystem of system and solution providers, they can quickly meet mission-critical needs. Itanium processor-based servers are incredibly scalable, allowing configuration in systems of as many as 512 processors and a full petabyte (1024TB) of RAM. Together with full support for both 32-bit and 64-bit applications, that capacity provides unmatched flexibility in tailoring systems to your enterprise needs.
Mission-Critical Servers and RISC Replacement
The new Intel® Itanium® processor 9300 series delivers a major step forward in this processor family. It provides more than double the performance of the Intel® Itanium® processor 9100 series, along with greater scalability and enhanced Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS) features. Systems based on this new processor are ideal for running demanding enterprise applications, such as database, business intelligence and enterprise resource planning (ERP). The most significant improvements in the Intel Itanium processor 9300 series include:
- Double the number of processing cores:
The new processor has four high-performance cores, which will substantially boost performance for many applications and provide greater capacity for consolidating more applications and heavier workloads per server.
- Many-fold increases in bandwidth: With two integrated memory controllers and new Intel® QuickPath Interconnect Technology, memory interconnect bandwidth has been improved by up to a factor of six and system interconnect bandwidth by up to a factor of nine. These increases help to sustain high utilization rates for all four processing cores, enabling substantial gains in performance and throughput for demanding workloads. They also provide a resilient and high-performance foundation for building large multiprocessor systems.
- Greater physical memory capacity: The memory subsystem with its new Intel® Scalable Memory Interconnect (Intel® SMI) supports up to eight times more memory than the previous-generation processor using standard DDR3 memory components. Server manufacturers can take advantage of this enhancement to design systems with more memory capacity for memory-intensive workloads and customers can leverage the volume economics of DDR3 memory.
- Next-generation RAS and manageability features: The Intel Itanium processor 9300 series builds on the mainframe-class RAS features of its predecessor, extending and enhancing the ability to detect, correct and manage errors; add and replace components without downtime; and dynamically allocate resources among multiple running partitions.
