High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The IA-32 Execution Layer (IA-32 EL) is a software emulator in the form of a software driver that improves performance of 32-bit applications running on 64-bit Intel Itanium-based systems, particularly those running Linux and Windows Server 2003 (it is included in Windows 2003 SP1 and later and in most Linux distributions for Itanium). The IA-32 EL bypasses the slow x86 hardware emulation which is available on pre-Montecito Itanium models.