It’s time to get on the 64-bit bandwagon, and I don’t mean Intel Itanium’s either (of which its development partner, HP, has jumped off after the processor family’s years of miserable sales). I’m talking about x64, or what Intel calls EM64T and AMD calls AMD64. Call it whatever you want, your next computer will be 64-bit.
The x64 architecture basically builds on the x86 32-bit architecture we’ve been using since, what, 1988? That means x64 processors natively understand and run 32-bit code as if those applications were running on pure 32-bit machines. This means they won’t be running in slow emulation mode (like the WOW64 emulation layer implemented by 64-bit Windows for Itanium processors). In fact, AMD Athlon 64 chips have been currying around under your nose running 32-bit Windows for years now.
|