A popular nickname for the
64 bit Intel Processor officially named
Itanium. First introduced at
The Register the name Itanic was first coined several years ago by
Mike Magee who now writes for
The Inquirer
The name reflects the huge ambitions of the processor because of its entirely new ISA and several new courageous design ambitions. However the release has been poor to date due to some additional terrible design choices and obvious difficulties with such a new and aggressive product. Itanium got stuck with having to support old x86 code and attempting to have too many features with a cache size and register size that make the chip large and expensive to make. Future Itanium releases, such as Madison and Deerfield, are looking promising as Intel irons out mistakes. Also, most of the well respected Alpha Processor design team, formerly of Compaq, were hired by Intel and are now working on this project.