The document discusses the IA-64 architecture, which was jointly developed by Intel and HP as a 64-bit architecture intended for implementation on EPIC processors like Itanium. Some key points:
- IA-64 uses explicit instruction-level parallelism specified by the compiler rather than relying on superscalar execution. It supports long instruction bundles containing multiple operations.
- The architecture has large register sets, multiple execution units, predicated execution, and support for software pipelining to further exploit instruction level parallelism.
- The Itanium processor implemented IA-64 using a superscalar design with hardware support for the EPIC features like predication and speculation.