We study the performance of the Itanium 2 processor on a number of benchmarks from computational electromagnetics. In detail, we show how the hardware performance counters of the Itanium 2 can be used to analyze the behavior of a kernel code. Yee_bench, for the FDTD method. We also present performance results for a parallel FDTD code on a cluster of HP rx2600 Intel Itanium 2 based workstations. Finally we give results from a benchmark suite of an industrial time-domain code based on the FDTD method. Ail these results show that the Itanium 2/rx2600 is very well suited to the FDTD method due to its high main memory bandwidth.