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