Hi.It has been long since a post had been made in this blog. Forgive my negligence, those few loyal readers I have (At least, I have).These days were hectic and I too many jobs on hand to be completed and completed well.
This post, was to just comment on Intel’s, well, negligence (!)?
Hmm, I shall start off then.
As we all know pretty well, AMD had released the first 64-bit processor for desktops and Intel, for a long long time laid its bet on its very-successful 32-bit architecture, well known as IA32. However, Intel, of late (well, at least I have come to know it very late) has realized its fallacy and now all (read ALL) of its processors are 32-bit, including those which were released as 32bit initially which includes Pentium 4,Pentium D, Pentium Extreme Edition, Celeron D ,Xeon and Core Duo line of processors.
AMD has long copied Intel’s designs in that passed 32-bit era of computing (you are allowed to disagree, as usual :D).But, it seems history has its irony and Intel HAD TO adopt AMD’s x86-64 architecture, which was the name AMD gave to its 64-bit processors. Intel renamed this Intel64 and careful note is to be taken to the fact that Intel64 is a completely different architecture from IA-64 and all other implementations of x86-64. IA-64 is the architecture used for the Itanium series of processors from Intel.
Intel has lost the crown of having the fastest processor model since the introduction of AMD Athlon X2 series of processors. However, on July 27, 2006, Intel released its Core 2 Duo series of processors based on the Conroe core(covered on October 27th,click here), and reclaimed its crown and further establishing its lead when it released its Core 2 Quad series(covered on November 2nd,click here).
However, I have stated that I would be talking about Intel’s negligence, although that was a word used rashly above. What I am cribbing about is that Intel, on the Technical Specification sheet does not mention explicitly, the much wanted ’64-bit’ word .All the sheet says is that the Core 2 Duo supports the Intel Extended Memory 64 technology what it calls Intel EM64.
If it takes a person a reading in a online encyclopedia to determine whether a processor is 32-bit or not, and the company’s website says nothing, then should I presume that Intel’s tying to hide something from its customers? Especially that there are not many 64-bit applications around for common use? Any other reasons?
And ,as usual ,my fascination with codenames continues.
Here are some for trivia:
Conroe: The core with which the initial Core 2 series of processors came out.
Conroe XE: The core for Core 2 Extreme Edition.
Allendale: The cores which the present Core 2 processors had.
Kentsfield: Codename for Core 2 Quad.
Woodcrest: Codename for the server side version of Core 2, marketed as the well known Xeon.
Merom : The mobile version of Core 2.
Penryn: The successor to Merom (this will have a 45nm core.All others have 65nm cores)
