
X64 Deep Dive - ingve
http://www.codemachine.com/article_x64deepdive.html
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bla2
Note that this is Windows and visual studio specific. Things are a bit
different on Linux.

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jsolson
Yeah, that becomes apparent pretty early on. Annoyingly, the author refers to
"the" compiler and sort of assumes the entire world is on Windows. This turns
what would otherwise be a useful but incomplete reference into something more
or less useless outside of people who never leave a Microsoft platform.

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to3m
Well I disagree that it's useless!

If you start from their home page it does make it a bit clearer that this is
going to be Windows-specific.

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legulere
This site needs some css:
[http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com)

The x in x64 is a small one, also x86-64 is preferable.

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tbirdz
I've noticed that windows and microsoft developers tend to call it x64, while
unix-like developers (linux, OS X, BSDs, etc) call it x86_64.

Does anyone have any idea why this is?

My personal theory is that mainstream Windows only runs on x86 (not counting
early NT kernels, or Windows RT), so when they ported their OS to work on
Intel and AMD's 64-bit cpu, that was the only 64-bit cpu that their OS could
run on, so they called it x64. Unix like systems supported many other 64-bit
architectures, so it was necessary for them to distinguish between the 64-bit
extension to the x86 architecture (x86_64) and other 64-bit architectures they
supported.

This is just a theory though, so if anyone has any concrete reasons for this
difference in terminology, I'd love to hear it.

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kyberias
Microsoft first ported NT to IA-64 (Intel Itanium) and called it IA64. Next
64-bit port was AMD's x86-64 which they called x64. At the time AMD called it
AMD64 and Intel started to call it Intel64. The terminology really didn't
stabilized at the time to "x86_64".

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yuhong
Actually EM64T was used by Intel in the early days.

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nickpsecurity
That's what I thought it was called when I looked it up to see if x64 was same
thing. Typed in EM64T to get three or so more haha.

