Datacenters have rapidly evolved, with software innovation greatly surpassing the ability of hardware technology to efficiently support it. The Internet of Things, the Cloud, and an ever increasing mobile workforce have transformed datacenters of all sizes to become service providers, providing intelligible data on demand in a secure manner. Over the past decade, there have been major advances within the software ecosystem, while the x86 server CPU has seen only incremental and comparatively nominal improvements, leaving the modern datacenter constrained and starved for innovation. This new era of computing demands a new breed of processor, one with the power to efficiently support the workloads of today's software-defined datacenter while providing protection from the silicon level up against sophisticated threats. To achieve optimized performance for today's datacenter applications, a processor that delivers more performance, flexibility, and security through a better balance of reso