HardwareBanter - View Single Post - AMD planning 45nm 12-Core 'Istanbul' Processor ?

**Scott Lurndal**

Wes Newell writes:
On Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:18:24 -0400, krw wrote:

In article ,
says...
" writes:
What could be more boring than the x86 domination we have now?
Without AMD, there would be no such monoculture.

Did you mean "without Intel"?

I suppose if AMD hadn't been around, there would have been a greater
chance of Intel getting their butts whipped by some other architecture,
instead of by AMD.

What architecture? You grossly underestimate the x86 inertia.

Of course AMD _did_ come up with "x86-64", which is an improvement over
the x86 (obviously even Intel thinks so).

Intel did too, but had no interest in pushing it forward to product.

Funny, that's not how I recall it. Intel dropped their x86-64 bit plans
after trying to push it onto Microsoft, and Microsoft telling them to
shove off. I think this link will get more to the truth.

From a history perspective, the P7 circa 1996 was to be the 64-bit follow-on
to the ia32 architecture. Then Intel shifted gears and joined with HP
to merge the P7 with some stuff at HP, producing Itanium. Itanium _was_
intel's 64-bit story (with the 32-bit x86 support in the processor). However,
Merced was late and slow and AMD did x86_64 and Intel was forced to include
it.

scott