On Sun, Mar 6, 2011 at 12:55 PM, Tony Yarusso <tonyyarusso at gmail.com> wrote: > > On Sun, Mar 6, 2011 at 12:25 PM, terry houle <houletr at yahoo.com> wrote: > > So the question is will the 64bit AMD run with my Intel chip? > > > > If I download the 32 bit as recommended will that be an Intel instruction > set and still be ok with my 64 bit chip. > > Certainly. (The architecture is called "amd64" basically just because > AMD did it first - it's the same stuff for AMD and Intel now.) > Just to follow up on that with some history... Intel was planning on keeping it's "consumer" desktop chips 32-bit for much longer than they did. Their view was 64-bit was a high-end enterprise/scientific requirement and they didn't want to bolt on 64-bit functionality on top of the x86 instruction set/architecture. Rather, they wanted to stick to 64-bits in their nice 64-bit-from-the-ground-up Itanium processor and force people who needed it to pay more. Basically, Intel wanted 64-bit computing to drive demand for Itanium. At that time, AMD was looking for a competitive advantage and also perceived the demand, so they created their own instruction set, layered it over the x86 architecture, and shoved it out the door. It was a genius move, and while it took awhile for all of the software to catch up, people who wanted 64-bit computing on a cheap processor were buying AMD processors. Intel quickly realized they'd missed an opportunity and, in an amusing turn around of circumstances, reverse engineered and implemented the AMD64 instruction set. Intel calls the 64-bit extensions "em64t". But any linux distro telling you what your Intel processor with em64t technology is will report it as AMD64, because that's what it is. If you run the "file" command on any 64-bit binaries, I'm pretty sure they will be reported as AMD64... -Rob -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20110306/6772cfbb/attachment-0001.html>