High availability and reliability in the itanium processor

Abstract

1 Designed for the high-end server market, the processor provides features (see the sidebar, next page) that maximize system reliability and availability. These features include fault coverage at the hardware level, a configurable multilevel error containment strategy, an availability feature set, and a machine check abort (MCA) architecture. Reliability features Soft errors are unintended transitions of logic states in a processor typically caused by external sources of ionizing radiation. The ionization creates excess free carriers, which recombine with the charges in the storage nodes, thereby corrupting information. There