Binand Sethumadhavan wrote:
On 19/02/07, Klaus Steden <klaus.steden@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Newbie-ish question... what exactly is the difference between i686 and
> x86_64? I imagine athlon is specifically for AMD 64-bit processors?
>
One short answer is that a 32-bit CPU (i386 - Pentium, Athlon, etc.) uses
32-bit addressing, while a 64-bit CPU (x86_64 - Opteron, Itanium,
etc.) uses
64-bit addressing -- meaning your OS and applications can address more
than 4
GB of memory at one time.
I know that much... my question was specifically about x86_64 and i686
(since I was under the impression that i686 also means a 64-bit
processor).
I imagine i686 covers a much wider range of CPUs, not all of which are
64-bit?
Trye, As does "athlon."
Similar on other architectures too, not all Sparcs, Powers, S/360 family
CPUs do 64-bits. Doubtless the flags depend on atchitecture too: the
flags register is an 8086 thing, S/370 uses control registers for this
(and more).
--
Cheers
John
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