The ItaniumProcessorFamily is Intel's development of a 64-bit processor architecture. I wish to point out that the first 64-bit processors were created years ago. The one that I currently use is known as PaRisc from HewlettPackard.
Not to mention the long-reigning king of 64 bit processors, the DigitalEquipmentCorporation AlphaProcessor. Sadly in decline, if not quite deceased.
The Intel Itanium Processor offers some of the following...
- instruction parallelism
- 128 general purpose integer registers
- 128 floating point registers
- 64 1-bit predicate registers
- 8 branch registers
- 128 special purpose application registers
- data and control speculation
- branch predication
- full, IA-32 backwards compatibility