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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 an
by tbirdz 11y ago
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.
- eumoria 11y agoThis is the most likely reason but I see them labelled as amd64 most of the time. x64 is just s shorthand because people were so used to saying x86 for so long.
- MichaelGG 11y agoWindows ran on DEC Alpha, which was 64-bit (even though Windows wasn't). x64 is just shorter and it's unambiguous, so it should be preferred.
- kyberias 11y agoMicrosoft 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".
- EvanAnderson 11y agoThe PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE environment variable on x64 builds of Windows has always been "AMD64", however.
- yuhong 11y agoActually EM64T was used by Intel in the early days.
- nickpsecurity 11y agoThat'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.
- to3m 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64 The BSD family of OSs and several Linux distributions use AMD64, and so does Microsoft Windows internally.