x86-64 on i386 (was Re: Promoting i386 version over x86_64?)

[John5342]

On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 00:20, Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to> wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 13, 2009 at 16:19:54 -0600,
>  Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net> wrote:
>>
>> That would be AMD that fixed it, not Intel.  Intel tried to push
>> everybody to a new architecture (Itanium), while AMD revised and
>> extended i386 to 64 bits.  After Itanium failed to catch on in the
>> marketplace, Intel had to copy AMD's work.
>
> I expect that has a lot to do with AMD being open source friendly. If they
> had had to rely on Microsoft to get an OS to run on their machine, they
> probably would have failed as well.

Actually i think the reason AMDs approach worked was because it was
backward compatible with ix86 so instead of having to have an OS ready
up front and people having to migrate wholesale customers could start
upgrading to x86_64 processors slowly while still using 32bit OS. Then
as 64bit OS becomes available people can use that whilst still
enjoying their favorite apps that haven't yet been ported to 64bit. In
short it was evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

-- 
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who understand binary
and those who don't...