Carl Fink wrote: > Facundo Aguirre wrote: > > >From http://www.debian.org/ports/amd64/: > > The port consists of a kernel for all AMD 64bit CPUs with > > AMD64 extension and all *Intel CPUs* with Intel 64 extension, > > and a common 64bit userspace. > > Thank you. Also, what a terrible idea! Is that stupid and confusing name > chosen by the Debian kernel team, or upstream?
The name is amd64 because AMD developed it. The author gets the honor of naming it. AMD64 was chosen by Intel for Intel cpus when Intel decided to produce chips to AMD's specification. Of course Intel would prefer to downplay this but it is what it is. You may be buying an Intel Core i5 but the architecture is the AMD64 architecture. The same was true for years in reverse when AMD produced chips to Intel's specification. If you had a IA-32 AMD k7 Athlon cpu the correct kernel was the Intel i686 kernel for it. Same for Cyrix, Transmeta, and VIA chips. This is the same thing. The companies do often leap-frog each other. Competition is good for consumers. VIA and others also make chips with the amd64 architecture. The Debian kernel string refers to the architecture not to the vendor that produced the chip because there are many vendors producing the same architecture. Intel also produces their own 64-bit architecture called IA-64 known as Itanium. Those systems are usually only found in high-end servers. They are rarely seen by consumers of low-end systems. A common confusion is people trying to load IA-64 software onto a non-Itanium system. Of course that can't work. However if Intel had been able to market this architecture into the low-end consumer market then it would be conceivable that we would all be running IA-64 systems instead of AMD64 systems. But that didn't happen. I have been enjoying the influx of ARM cpus due to their more efficient power envelope. In the end will the ARM architecture be more dominant? Who can know the future before it is written? It is positioned well for it. Bob
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