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If x86 refers to 32 bit, what family do the 8086/88/186/286 belong to? 8080_16? :-) I do suspect as time goes by x86 is just becoming more synonymous with the
by fredoralive 6y ago
If x86 refers to 32 bit, what family do the 8086/88/186/286 belong to? 8080_16? :-)
I do suspect as time goes by x86 is just becoming more synonymous with the 64 bit variant, the 32 bit and 16 bit modes are increasingly irrelevant to anyone except boot ROM authors and retro enthusiasts.
- spijdar 6y agoAs mentioned above by someone else, what they mean by "x86” is something of a hybrid. The kernel/ring 0 code is certainly 64 bit, and I suspect they may be using 64 bit long mode everywhere, but they're making special accomodations to the many VMS programs that assume 32 bit pointers. This isn't relevant just to VAX code -- because previous versions of VMS made these same accomodations, some programs simply never changed, up to Itanium, despite both alpha and Itanium being 64 bit (and only 64 bit, alpha didn't and I don't think Itanium had "true" 32 bit modes) So "x86” is really referring more to the platform than the specific CPU or mode here, since it'll be a pretty seamless mixture of both.
- selfhoster11 6y agoI have never seen anyone refer to x86 as a synonym for the 64-bit ISA. In the Linux world, it's amd64, in the Windows world it's x64/64-bit, and sometimes in both of those worlds, x86_86. I don't think this loss of distinction is occurring at all.