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News Glance: The Essential Commentary on the Week’s Hottest News (page 3)

Category: Editorial

by Anton Shilov

[ 07/09/2004 | 04:52 PM ]

Intel and AMD Ship x86-64 Chips, Transition to 64-bit Years Away

With the launch of Intel Xeon “Nocona” processors the world’s largest chipmaker admitted: transition of conventional x86 architecture to 64-bit is an inevitable result of technology evolution. However, this evolution may still be a couple of years away from business desktop computers.

“Unimportant” AMD Technology Found Inside Intel’s Products

Probably for the first time in history Intel Corporation decided to follow its much smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices, who become well-known in the eighties for making clones of Intel 80286, 80386 and 80486 microprocessors. Earlier both companies had some technologies that could be opposed, but at the end AMD always had to support Intel’s developments. With the x86-64 Intel had to copy AMD’s approach and put its Itanium strategy under cross-fire of IBM’s and Sun’s RISC processors along with Intel’s and AMD’s x86-64 offerings.

Intel's vision of workstation with x86-64 processor inside

Intel has been downplaying the importance of transition to x86-64 for years and formally launched its Xeon processors with 64-bit capability about 14 months after AMD. While the delay is not that dramatic amid the absence of any mainstream 64-bit operating systems, it turned out that Microsoft intentionally allows its beta version of Windows for x86-64 systems to run only on AMD64-based machines. As a consequence of this, Intel-based x86-64 computers cannot be used for x86-64 software testing purposes, which may generally slowdown transition to 64-bit computing.