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64-bit x86 Computing Reaches 10th Anniversary

Posted by Unknown on from the long-live-athlonmp dept.

illiteratehack writes "10 years ago AMD released its first Opteron processor, the first 64-bit x86 processor. The firm's 64-bit 'extensions' allowed the chip to run existing 32-bit x86 code in a bid to avoid the problems faced by Intel's Itanium processor. However AMD suffered from a lack of native 64-bit software support, with Microsoft's Windows XP 64-bit edition severely hampering its adoption in the workstation market." But it worked out in the end.

2 of 332 comments (clear)

  1. x32 ABI by Chirs · · Score: 5, Informative

    And for those that want the best of both worlds, there is the x32 ABI, which uses all the good stuff from x86-64 (more registers, better floating-point performance, faster position-independent code shared libraries, function parameters passed via registers, faster syscall instruction... ) while using 32-bit pointers and thus avoiding the overhead of 64-bit pointers.

    They're working on porting Linux to the new ABI...kernel and compiler support is there, not sure about all the userspace stuff.

  2. Re:Let us give thanks.... by Cyclon · · Score: 5, Informative

    They're working on it: http://www.amd.com/us/press-releases/Pages/JimKellerJoinsAMD-2012aug01.aspx