As a direct response to your subject, I quote "Why should Distros be called as i386 for a 32-bit PC, and as amd64 for a 64-bit PC, when Intel Core PCs are also 64bit systems?" Because the currently successful Intel architecture (core, etc) is (more or less) a copy of AMD's. The history goes roughly like this: Intel designed a 64 bit architecture to replace their aging 32 bit line of *86 processors (386 and followers), which thei called Itanium [1]. As sometimes happens with such technology jumps, it was too ambitious and its market acceptance was a bit disappointing (this happened to Intel a couple of times in its history, whenever it tried to break out of its compatibility treadmill [2]. It is interesting to see how they have become themselves victims of the very technological lock-in they take advantage of). Anyway: AMD saw its opportunity window and came up with a far more conservative 64 bit architecture which was much more backward compatible, the AMD64, also sometimes called x86-64 [3]. Basically, they had the instruction set and wider (64 bit) registers and... much more of them (something which was known to be a weakness in the x86 32 bit family). To keep AMD from eating all of their lunch, Intel had to follow, so that's why they copied an architecture from AMD who copied it from Intel :-) Well, more or less. Follow the links below for the whole, long story. And oh, Linux ran on Itanium, too. Linus Torvalds didn't like that architecture, which he called "Itanic" (although I think others came up with that name). Cheers [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_processors#32-bit_processors:_the_non-x86_microprocessors [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD64 - t
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