On Sat, Nov 09, 2013 at 09:49:57AM -0800, Ray Dillinger wrote: > On 11/09/2013 06:08 AM, didier gaumet wrote: > > >>The machine is an Asus Sabertooth X79 motherboard, IA64 "Sandy Bridge" > >>architecture, > >[...] > > > >On the Asus website, this is not an IA64 motherboard, but a X86-64 > >(amd64) one. Trying an amd64 version of Debian could help... > > On the ASUS website the board has an Intel Chipset with LGA 2011 CPU socket: > https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/SABERTOOTH_X79/#overview > > LGA 2011 is compatible with Intel 64-bit processors including "Sandy Bridge:" > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGA_2011 > > And that seemed to clinch it, except that the damn thing wasn't working, so I > went to a third source and discovered why I was wrong: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/amd64 > > The news to me is that INTEL ever deigned to release something whose > instruction > set is commonly known as AMD-anything. I've been assuming that "Intel 64" > would > be "IA64" instruction set and "AMD 64" would be "AMD64" instruction set. > So...
Just to bring up a point of history, you are in a sense correct. Intel DID design a 64-bit instruction set which they named "IA-64". This was introduced in 2001 on the Itanium series of processors. As I understand it, Itanium processors natively run in 64-bit mode, but can execute 32-bit (IA-32) instructions through a form of emulation. (As a result most of the code that was available at the time ran unnecessarily slowly on Itanium processors). In contrast, AMD introduced the AMD64 architecture in 1999/2000 on the AMDK8 series processors. AMD64-based processors start in 32-bit mode and are switched into 64-bit mode (long mode) by a knowledgeable kernel. As such, 32-bit code runs "natively fast" on such a processor. In 2004, Intel became convinced that the IA-64 (Itanium) architecture wasn't going to be a commercial success, so began to implement their own processors compatible with the AMD64 instructions (they called this IA-32e, EMT64 or Intel 64). Debian, however, chooses to keep "amd64" as the architecture name for this popular architecture. For one, it reminds people that it was AMD who developed the architecture in the first place and honours them for that. Secondly, it's churlish to change the name of an architecture (with resulting change in compiler, libraries and so on) just because of market forces :)
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