64 bit linux on Intel T9600

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Jamon Camisso <jamon.camisso-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org>

| James Knott wrote:

| > Unless it's an Itanium CPU, it will work fine.  The Intel X86-64 CPU
| > borrowed the AMD instruction set.

Right.  I think that this was a license agreement, so "borrowed" is
misleading in that it appears to be a euphamism for unauthorized
copying.

My understanding is that AMD offers a no-cost license for this
architecture.  This was likely a precondition for success.  Probably a
Very Good Thing for consumers (one intent of the IA-64 process was to
capture the architecture as Intellectual Property of Intel (and
possibly HP), unlike the x86 which kind of got away from them).

| we'd all be better of pretending like itanium never happened. I'd hazard a
| guess that no more than a handful of people on this list have used one. Maybe
| that's naive and it needed to happen to spur development of the x86-64
| instruction set, I dunno.
| 
| But I'm sure that all IA-64 has caused anyone is headache, heartache, a hole
| in their wallet,

I have an Itanium.  I got it recently in a weak moment.  Free, until
you factor in the hydro bill.  Also noisy (as are most rack mount
servers).

I like architectural diversity.  It can be used to help C programmers 
(like me) discover where they've written unportable code. ("all the 
world's a VAX" disease). Unfortunately the x86-64 ABI panders to this 
disease (evidence: sizeof(int) == 4!).

| and no small amount of confusion when it comes to
| x86_64/amd64. The question comes up a few times a day in various distros' irc
| channels.

I blame Debian for retaining the originally-reasonable name AMD64.
All sensible people agree that the architecture name is x86-64 (or
x86_64 if "-" causes lexical problems).  Apparently AMD now calls it
AMD64 and Intel now calls it Intel 64); silly children.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists