The PA-8900 processor is a dual-core microprocessor chip. Like the PA-8800, the PA-8900 microprocessor achieves a compelling, balanced increase in performance over the previous versions of the PA-RISC microprocessors in a broad range of commercial and technical computing applications. Key advances include greater compute density, a higher-bandwidth system bus, and a large second-level cache, translating into a significant performance boost. In addition to these performance increases, the PA-8900 processor provides significant advances in high availability and lower power requirements compared to previous generations of PA-RISC processors.