Intel Itanium 9150M, Manual

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Volume 3: About this Manual 3:1
About this Manual 1
The Intel
®
Itanium
®
architecture is a unique combination of innovative features such
as explicit parallelism, predication, speculation and more. The architecture is designed
to be highly scalable to fill the ever increasing performance requirements of various
server and workstation market segments. The Itanium architecture features a
revolutionary 64-bit instruction set architecture (ISA) which applies a new processor
architecture technology called EPIC, or Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing. A key
feature of the Itanium architecture is IA-32 instruction set compatibility.
The Intel
®
Itanium
®
Architecture Software Developer’s Manual provides a
comprehensive description of the programming environment, resources, and instruction
set visible to both the application and system programmer. In addition, it also describes
how programmers can take advantage of the features of the Itanium architecture to
help them optimize code.
1.1 Overview of Volume 1: Application Architecture
This volume defines the Itanium application architecture, including application level
resources, programming environment, and the IA-32 application interface. This volume
also describes optimization techniques used to generate high performance software.
1.1.1 Part 1: Application Architecture Guide
Chapter 1, “About this Manual” provides an overview of all volumes in the Intel
®
Itanium
®
Architecture Software Developer’s Manual .
Chapter 2, “Introduction to the Intel
®
Itanium
®
Architecture” provides an overview of
the architecture.
Chapter 3, “Execution Environment” describes the Itanium register set used by
applications and the memory organization models.
Chapter 4, “Application Programming Model” gives an overview of the behavior of
Itanium application instructions (grouped into related functions).
Chapter 5, “Floating-point Programming Model” describes the Itanium floating-point
architecture (including integer multiply).
Chapter 6, “IA-32 Application Execution Model in an Intel
®
Itanium
®
System
Environment” describes the operation of IA-32 instructions within the Itanium System
Environment from the perspective of an application programmer.
1.1.2 Part 2: Optimization Guide for the Intel
®
Itanium
®
Architecture
Chapter 1, “About the Optimization Guide” gives an overview of the optimization guide.