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