Systems based on Intel’s Itanium ArchitectureIntel’s Itanium architecture provides the most scalable platform currently available for mission-critical Windows Server deployments. Itanium processors can execute more instructions per clock cycle than current generation x64 processors, and provide a total of 256 general and floating point registers. The Itanium architecture is built to support future servers containing up to 512 processors and 1,000 terabytes of RAM. Systems based on the Itanium architecture often offer a variety hardware features that provide improved fault tolerance for mission-critical workloads. Itanium-based systems with Windows Server provide a fault-tolerant platform suitable for high-end RISC/UNIX system replacement, floating-point intensive applications, and applications that share data extensively among processes. Itanium processors utilize Intel’s EPIC architecture. Unlike x64 processors, Itanium processors are not backwards compatible with traditional 32-bit x86 software. Itanium processors do allow certain 32-bit x86 software to run in emulation, but the performance of the software will be reduced. Backward compatibility is a key point differentiating Itanium from x86 and x64 architectures. Server applications are available in native Itanium editions for the Windows platform .  Microsoft Products for Itanium-based Systems
Windows Server 2003 for Itanium-based Systems is well-suited for native 64-bit applications requiring the highest levels of reliability, availability, and scalability. With systems available that support up to 64-way symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and 1 terabyte of memory, Windows Server 2003 for Itanium-based Systems is the most scalable version of the Windows platform. Typical workloads include database and business applications. Because the features in the latest R2 release of Windows Server 2003 apply to workloads targeted for different environments, no R2 version of Windows Server 2003 for Itanium-based systems is planned.
Products Microsoft offers versions of both the Enterprise Edition and the Datacenter Edition of Windows Server 2003 for Itanium-based systems. Windows Server support for Itanium will continue with Windows Server 2008, targeted specifically at the workloads with which customers have most frequently deployed Itanium-based systems: databases, line of business applications, and custom applications.
Microsoft also offers SQL Server 2005 for Itanium-based systems. The following links provide details regarding system requirements.
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