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Tom’s Hardware
Tom’s Hardware
Technology
Christopher Harper

Former Intel CPU engineer details how internal x86-64 efforts were suppressed prior to AMD64's success

Intel Pentium 4.

Earlier today on Twitter, AMD engineer Phil Park identified a curious nugget of PC architectural history from, of all places, a year-old Quora answer posted by former Intel engineer Robert Colwell. The nugget indicates that Intel could have beaten AMD to the x86-64 punch if the former wasn't dead-set on the x64-only Itanium line of CPUs. The historical context of this story and the comments within are fascinating, especially considering today's desktop CPU architectures, where "64-bit" is immediately understood to mean x86-64 — because who wants a computer that can't natively run most applications made for a PC?

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