I am confused about the Bulldozer chip

[supaflyx3]

Intel didn't introduce EM64T until the pentium D era for consumer market, and AMD didn't introduce it until athlon 64. Most of the first 775 CPUs that intel released did not support EM64T, and was later on added.

[czarnianq]

There's no way they won't support a 64bit OS. That would be ludicrous with the RAM limitations of 32bit OS's

[chrisk]

The term x86 these days is thrown around to include x86 chips that have 64bit instructions included with them. Nothing to worry about.

Its like worrying that new HDTV won't support SD because its not called a SDHDTV...its understood to be there on all newer mainstream chips.

[enaberif]

Originally Posted by czarnianq

There's no way they won't support a 64bit OS. That would be ludicrous with the RAM limitations of 32bit OS's

Not everyone needs more than 3gb of ram. Lots of people are still only using 32bit OS`s

[LarkStarr]

Doesn't mean you'd design and launch a chip that doesn't include 64 bit instructions. That would be like saying "Oh I don't have HD cable so why would I buy an HDTV?"

[terrybear]

The whole 64 bit thing amd started with was the reason why the Athlon64 became a intel chip killer cause intel back then was only able to execute 32 bit bandwith paths in there architechure where as how amd planned the athlon64 cores design it was able to execute either 2 32 bit data paths or 1 64 bit one per clock cycle if 64 bit software was in place. Ergo for every 1 32 bit cycle a intel cpu was able to do, amd's was doing 2 of them & that was why for some time AMD's cpu's where kickin intels azz.

With Bulldozers design there doin a simular thing .... it has a 128 bit executable path per cycle in it which means it can execute either &/or: 4 x 32 bit, 2 x 32 bit & 1 x 64 bit, 2 x 64 bit or 1 x 128 bit data path per clock cycle.

Hope that helps you understand some. :)