short answer to technical question?

[Jonathan Berry]

On 11/14/05, Andy Green <andy at warmcat.com> wrote:
> Gerhard Magnus wrote:
>
> > The only documentation I have is installation instructions for the Intel
> > Pentium 4 processor that aren't very revealing (despite being in 15
>
> This is a great question... everybody just assumes everybody knows.
>
> i386, i486, all the Penium *s are 32-bit

Unfortunately, this is not true anymore.  There are 64-bit Pentuim 4s
out now, as well as 64-bit Celerons, I think.  This makes things
rather interesting.

> AMD's Athlon 64 and Opteron, and Intel's Itanium are 64-bit

Itaniums were a different type of 64-bit as well, using the IA64
architecture.  Athlon64s and Opterons are x86_64 architecture (AMD64),
a new 64-bit arch made to execute old x86 instructions as well as the
new 64-bit extensions.  IA64 seems to be all but dead now as x86_64
has caught on and been adopted by Intel as EM64T.

Jonathan