IA64 (Intel Itanium) support

Intel's IA-64 architecture, also known as Itanium, was a 64-bit architecture developed jointly by Intel and Hewlett-Packard, aimed at high-end servers and enterprise computing. Unlike traditional architectures that rely heavily on hardware to handle instruction scheduling and parallelism, IA-64 was based on a concept called Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC), where the compiler takes responsibility for identifying and encoding parallel operations.

This approach was meant to extract high performance by allowing the processor to execute multiple instructions simultaneously with minimal hardware overhead. The architecture introduced very long instruction words, each containing multiple operations that could be executed in parallel, and required sophisticated compiler technology to manage dependencies and scheduling. It supported advanced features like predication, rotating registers, and speculative execution, all designed to maximize instruction-level parallelism and reduce pipeline stalls.

However, the complexity of IA-64’s design made it difficult to support legacy x86 software efficiently, and compilers struggled to fully exploit its theoretical performance advantages. The ecosystem around IA-64 remained limited, and the high cost of development and deployment led to its gradual decline. Ultimately, the architecture was overshadowed by the continued evolution of x86-64 processors, which offered better compatibility and competitive performance without requiring a complete software overhaul.