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On 2012-09-15, Dale <rdalek1967@×××××.com> wrote: |
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> From my understanding, someone correct me if I am off here, AMD sort of |
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> beat Intel to the 64 bit thing. |
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|
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Not really. Intel came out with the IA64 architecture in 2001 in the |
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Itanium processor. The IA64 architecture was much more RISC-like than |
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the IA32 (x86) architecture. More importantly, it wasn't good at |
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running old IA32 software. It could emulate the IA32 instruction set, |
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but the emulation mode produced very slow performance. Because of |
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price and the poor backwards compatiblity it wasn't very popular on |
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the desktop (though it was used in some high-end servers and cluster |
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machines). |
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|
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A couple of years later, AMD came out with the AMD64 (x86-64) |
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architecture in the Opteron processor. It _was_ backwards compatible |
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with the IA32 and was quite popular -- though initially it was mainly |
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used in IA32 mode (I still run all my AMD64 machines in IA32 mode |
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because I'm too lazy to change over when there's little benefit). |
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|
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Once the Opteron family was widely adopted, and it became obvious that |
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the 64-bit mode of AMD64 processors was going to be vastly more |
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popular than the IA64 architecture, Intel jumped on board in 2004 with |
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the Xeon processor which implemented the AMD64 architecture. |
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|
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After years and years of miserable sales, Intel finally gave up |
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flogging the Itanium pocessor family and abandoned the IA64 |
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architecture in 2011. |
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|
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-- |
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Grant |
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