
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?
I was looking up some history behind the x86-64 transition, particularly around the Pentium 4 time frame, and I found out that Bob Colwell (Pentium Pro chief architect) has been posting on Quora.Pentium 4 had a version of x86-64 that was fused off. pic.twitter.com/eYWLpD0qoWOctober 18, 2024