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Athlon 64: How AMD turned the tables on Intel

(dfarq.homeip.net)
331 points giuliomagnifico | 2 comments | 25 Sep 25 18:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.004s | source
1. wicket ◴[25 Sep 25 21:00 UTC] No.45379009[source]▶
A couple of details missing from the article:

- Intel quietly introduced their implementation of amd64 under the name "EM64T". It was only later that they used the name "Intel64".

- Early Itanium processors included hardware features, microcode and software that implemented an IA‑32 Execution Layer (dynamic binary translation plus microcode assists) to run 32‑bit x86 code; while the EL often ran faster than direct software emulation, it typically lagged native x86 performance and could be worse than highly‑optimised emulators for some workloads or early processor steppings.

replies(1): >>45385528 #
2. p_l ◴[26 Sep 25 12:06 UTC] No.45385528[source]▶
EL was considered so bad, either Microsoft or HP speed ran an emulator implementation of their own which enabled HP-designed Itanium 2 to lack it.