Customer Reviews

Itanium Architecture for Software Developers

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is apparently intended for two different audiences: 1) the people who intend to eventually read the Itanium & IA-64 reference manuals that are freely-available as downloads from the Intel website but want a gentler introduction to the big picture at the forest level before examining the bark on each tree in the voluminous reference manuals and 2) the people, such as managers, who want to understand the key highpoints of very-long-instruction-word (VLIW) processors without slogging through thousands of pages in the Itanium & IA-64 reference manuals.

By the way, Intel brands the industry-wide generic term VLIW as EPIC®. In addition to being an introduction to Itanium itself, this book serves as a useful introduction to VLIW as a topic as well to compare & contrast VLIW with RISC and CISC, because (other than a line of DSPs from Texas Instruments) the Itanium line of processors over the past ten years has been one of the few VLIW processors to reach mass production in such large numbers.