Itanium

Back in the old days, when 64-bit computing was still a novel concept and RISC vs. CISC wars were still fought, HP and Intel joined forces to develop the next-generation CPU. It would be 64-bit only and it would have a new type of architecture called EPIC. That was in 1994.

This is the third part of a mini-series on Windows x64, focusing on behind the scene changes in the operating system. In the first two articles (here and here) I explained key concepts and limitations of the x86 platform: every 32-bit process can use 2 GB of address space, which is by far enough for most applications. However, the kernel is also limited to 2 GB of RAM, which can lead to bottlenecks on systems that need to keep track of large amounts of resources, which is typically the case on terminal servers.