Itanium Rising: Breaking Through Moore's Second Law of Computing Power

This book covers the development and application of Itanium. It describes why the revolutionary leap forward in processing power can help CEO's achieve their company's vision. It also discusses the implication of these changes to a company's IT infrastructure. The book touches on issues involving how to move away from the desktop model of computing into implementing a system that best makes use of the IPF. The final section of the book discusses the future of the IPF and the technological changes resulting from it. This will prove to be a helpful guide and forecaster. Moore's Law states that the number of transistors in computer chips, which directly affects how fast a computer can process information, will double every eighteen months. However, computing speed has been held back by Moore's lesser-known second law: more transistors added do not necessarily mean that performance will double every 18 months. Most IT environments today rely on RISC based machines which have been increasing performance over the last several years by adding complexity to the chip to create "superscalar, out-of-order execution engines". While these have improvements have continued to increase system power year after year, there are now indications that we cannot depend on RISC to give the same benefits into the future.