The Intel Itanium is a family of 64-bit microprocessors that was first introduced in the year 2001. It was designed to be a high-performance processor that could handle complex computing tasks such as data analysis, scientific simulations, and enterprise-level applications. The Itanium processors were based on a new architecture called EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing) which was developed by Intel in collaboration with Hewlett-Packard.