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AMD's 64-Bit Chip

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the lookit-all-them-bits-in-there dept.

EyesWideOpen writes "AMD is set to release a 64-bit chip early next year which will be completely backwards compatible with the Athlon line. The current 64-bit offering from Intel, Itanium, is an entirely new chip that has no backwards compatibility with its x86 line of chips (from the 8080 chip to the Pentium IV) and is designed only for high end servers. AMD's solution to this problem is the Opteron chip (product info) which will be in servers, desktops and laptops. Here is a wired article."

1 of 476 comments (clear)

  1. Itanium does support IA-32 instructions by Michael+Wardle · · Score: 1, Redundant

    A quick web search shows Itanium is x86 compatible.

    Admittedly, the Itanium does this using emulation, whereas the Opteron is supposed to handle 32-bit instructions natively, however the statement that 32-bit code will not work on Itanium is quite misleading.