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