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I thought it was the DEC Alpha which was the first commercial 64-bit CPU?
by discardorama 12y ago
I thought it was the DEC Alpha which was the first commercial 64-bit CPU?
- fulafel 12y agoNope. MIPS was 91, Alpha 92. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/64_bit#64-bit_processor_timeline https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/64_bit#64-bit_processor_time...
- kps 12y agoThere were 64-bit CPUs long before there were 64-bit microprocessors. I don't know what the first was, but the IBM 7030 was a 64-bit machine in 1961. (My first computing job, as a co-op, involved testing a UNIX emulation environment for the 64-bit Control Data 180 series, in 1985.)
- fulafel 12y agoWell, Alpha and MIPS (and some supers before them) had 64 bit addressing to handle more than 4 GB of address space. The 7030 had just a handful of memory and no vm, through it did have a 64 bit word size. ARM and x86 have been able to handle 64 bit numbers without anyone claiming they're 64 bit.