Brian Christmas top-posted (grr): > Exactly my point Larry, the latest 'Steve Jobs keynote presentation' > version of System profiler seems to identify the chip manufacturer. But > how?
On x86 and AMD64 processors, the CPUID instruction returns a significant amount of information about the processor and its capabilities. One of the things you can get out of it is an identification string. The OS can ask for this string and display it. Calling up System Properties on the WinXP box I'm typing at right now identifies the installed processor as an "AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3500+" (exact quote). The x86 Mac OS X System Profiler most likely does something similar, as does Linux when you view /proc/cpuinfo.
(Note that the speed rating of the processor (not to be confused with its clock speed, which WinXP says is 2.2 GHz) is included in the text. This makes life for chip remarkers more difficult.)
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