On Thu, 2005-09-01 at 13:39 -0400, Stephen P. Becker wrote: > > I hope this not. As (iirc) I already said, it's impossible to combine x86 > > with > > anything else that's not 100% source and binary compatible with itself... > > The reason is actually simple: x86 is, or at least was, the reference > > architecture for almost all programmers. > > Witih amd64 becoming so widespread, this will change. > > > There are too many packages that works *just* on x86, both at source and > > binary level. > > Doesn't the amd64 team have a set of 32-bit compat libs just to run > binary packages? When running 32-bit code, isn't amd64 basically just a > glorified athlon-xp?
No. It just has the same *instruction* set as an Athlon XP, plus SSE2 and even SSE3 in newer models. There's also the Intel EM64T stuff which is more like a P4 than an Athlon XP, since it has no 3Dnow! support. -- Chris Gianelloni Release Engineering - Strategic Lead/QA Manager Games - Developer Gentoo Linux
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