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The driver instability was only their fault. The fact is the reason AMD64 "won" was because in the late 2004 era, with SP2, Microsoft killed PAE (the concept, n
by zanny 12y ago
The driver instability was only their fault. The fact is the reason AMD64 "won" was because in the late 2004 era, with SP2, Microsoft killed PAE (the concept, not the implementation, by artificially limiting addressable memory), and the artificial memory limit on 32 bit systems doomed the architecture.
I speak only of the time period from 2004 - 2008 where we went from Pentium 4 to Core 2 (and Athlon64 to Phenom), where 64 bit became ubiquitous because Microsoft failed to provide its consumer grade OSes the ability to access the amounts of memory the hardware supported.
- joenathan 12y agoEveryone crapped on Microsoft because there were no x64 drivers for Vista, and the 3rd party manufacturers didn't want to create new drivers for their old hardware. It's Microsoft's fault that 3rd party driver support sucks? So they get blamed with they keep compatibility as in the case of PAE on x86 and blamed when they break it.
- yuhong 12y agoTo be more precise, they changed the 4GB physical memory limit to a physical address space limit. MS never intended even XP SP1 to officially support PAE, but the code happened to treat the 4GB limit as a physical memory limit. When XP SP2 added NX support which required PAE, driver compatibility forced MS to add the physical address space limit.