3 ms·
Pentium 4 was widely speculated of being able to run 64bit at the time of AMD64 delivering, but at half the speed. Essentially, while decoding a 64bit variant
by p_l 1y ago
Pentium 4 was widely speculated of being able to run 64bit at the time of AMD64 delivering, but at half the speed.
Essentially, while decoding a 64bit variant of x86 ISA might have been fused off, there was a very visible part that was common anyway, and that was available ALUs on NetBurst platform - which IIRC were 2x 32bit ALUs for integer ops. So you either issue micro-op to both to "chain" them together, or run every 64bit calculation in multiple steps.
- eigenform 1y agoYeah, they wrote a paper about the ALUs too, see: https://ctho.org/toread/forclass/18-722/logicfamilies/Deleganes05.pdf https://ctho.org/toread/forclass/18-722/logicfamilies/Delega... > There are two distinct 32-bit FCLK execution data paths staggered by one clock to implement 64-bit operations. If it weren't fused off, they probably would've supported 64-bit ops with an additional cycle of latency?
- p_l 1y agoAt least one cycle, yes, but generally it would make it possible to deliver. AFAIK it also became crucial part of how intel could deliver "EM64T" chips fast enough - only to forget to upgrade memory subsystem which is why first generation can't run Windows (they retained 36bit physical addressing from PAE when AMD64 mandates minimum of 40, and Windows managed to trigger an issue on that)