The Intel Itanium 2 processor, the second in a family of processors based on the Itanium architecture, is designed to address the needs of high-performance servers and workstations. The Itanium architecture goes beyond RISC and CISC approaches by employing Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC), which pairs extensive processing resources with intelligent compilers that enable parallel execution explicit to the processor. Its large internal resources combine with predication and speculation to enable optimization for high performance applications on multiple operating systems. The Itanium 2 processor is designed to support very large scale systems, including those employing thousands of processors, to provide the processing power and performance head room for the most demanding enterprise and technical computing applications. For high performance servers and workstations, the Itanium 2 processor offers outstanding performance and reliability for today's applications and the scalability to address the growing e-business needs of tomorrow.