> Well, nearly. Itanium Merced was 2001 [1] (althoug you wouldn't buy > /that/ as a private person), DEC Alpha was even 1992 [2];
FWIW And MIPS was there even a bit earlier with their R4000 (tho the software support for it only appeared some years later: they first wanted to have an installed base to which to deploy the software), which I believe was the first 64bit microprocessor. IIRC the claim back then was that adding 64bit support to the R4000 was rather cheap (it increased the die area by a few percents only, and 64bit adds were still fast enough not to slow down the overall chip's frequency). The same must have been true for the Opterons (except that the increase in die area much have been even much smaller since the CPU itself had become a much smaller part of the overall die because of the incorporation of things like the memory controller and the L1 and L2 caches). So it was a great move on the part of AMD: cheap to implement but with an enormous marketing impact. Stefan