Hacker News Reader

At my previous job we used itanium servers for the secure64 dns platform[1]. It performed well, the logic behind itanium is security not performance (according to secure64) but performance was never an issue. I do know the hardware support for rsa did give nice performance for dnssec signing.

[1] https://secure64.com/dns-products/secure64-platforms/secure-...

View on HN

The logic behind Itanium was mostly to have a 64-bit architecture that was specific to Intel without any cross-licensing to other vendors like AMD. And which would also replace proprietary RISC flavors like PA-RISC.

It did also have a fair bit of security acceleration built-in. As I recall, one of the principals behind Secure64 was one of the HP leads associated with the original IA64 announcement. Secure64 pushed Itanium for security applications when it was becoming clear that it was never going to be a mainstream 64-bit architecture.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com