x86-64 on i386 (was Re: Promoting i386 version over x86_64?)

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Sun, Dec 13, 2009 at 16:19:54 -0600,
  Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net> wrote:
> 
> That would be AMD that fixed it, not Intel.  Intel tried to push
> everybody to a new architecture (Itanium), while AMD revised and
> extended i386 to 64 bits.  After Itanium failed to catch on in the
> marketplace, Intel had to copy AMD's work.

I expect that has a lot to do with AMD being open source friendly. If they
had had to rely on Microsoft to get an OS to run on their machine, they
probably would have failed as well.