Processor Architecture

The Itanium™ Architecture is specified by the following documents

• Itanium ™ Architecture Software Developer's Manual Volume 1: Application Architecture

• Itanium ™ Architecture Software Developer's Manual Volume 2: System Architecture

• Itanium ™ Architecture Software Developer's Manual Volume 3: Instruction Set Reference

• IA-64 Processor Reference: Intel® Itanium ™ Processor Reference Manual for Software Development

• Itanium ™ Software Conventions & Runtime Architecture Guide

• Intel® Itanium ™ Processor-specific Application Binary Interface

Only the features of the Itanium™ processor instruction set may be assumed to be present. An application is responsible for determining if any additional instruction set features are available before using those additional features. If a feature is not present, then the application may not use it.

There are some features of the Itanium™ processor architecture that need not be supported by a conforming implementation. These are described in this chapter. A conforming application shall not rely on these features.

Applications conforming to this specification must provide feedback to the user if a feature that is required for correct execution of the application is not present. Applications conforming to this specification should attempt to execute in a diminished capacity if a required feature is not present.

This specfication does not provide any performance guarantees of a conforming system. A system conforming to this specification may be implemented in either hardware or software.

This specification describes only LP64 (i.e. 32-bit integers, 64-bit longs and pointers) based implementations. Implementations may also provide ILP32 (32-bit integers, longs, and pointers), but conforming applications shall not rely on support for ILP32. See section 1.2 of the Intel® Itanium ™ Processor-specific Application Binary Interface for further information.