Hacker News Reader

Comment by manuel_w | Hacker News Reader

If anyone is wondering: With X64 the author is referring to x86_64 a.k.a. AMD64. Wondering why they're introducing yet another name for the same thing.

View on HN

While I personally prefer the terms x86-64 or AMD64, x64 is used by Microsoft to describe the x86-64 architecture:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d...

There's even a guide from Intel that uses the term x64:

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/develop/external/us/en/doc...

Just to underline that, Microsoft has been using "x64" for about 20 years; the architecture was supported on Windows XP and Server 2003.

It's probably the clearest term to use when you're talking specifically about Windows binaries (PE files).

More than that, behind the scenes Microsoft helped AMD design x64.

(Source: someone who was there when it happened who then told me over beer.)

Yeah, I've heard this too. Apparently Dave Cutler himself had a hand in the design.

Also because davec hated Intel and demanded that the internal architecture name be called "amd64" in Windows itself to annoy them

Which also means that if you've been dealing with anything referencing build matricies in Visual Studio, you've been using "x64" too. Perhaps exclusively.

    devenv.com Everything.sln /Build "Debug|Win32"
    devenv.com Everything.sln /Build "Debug|x64"

I wouldn’t say that they’re introducing it, I see x64 used to refer to 64-bit x86 in a lot of places. If you don’t like it or think it’s technically wrong for some reason that’s one thing, but you’ll be fighting an uphill battle if you want it to go away.

It was called AMD64 when AMD and Microsoft designed it, but Intel objected using the term when they adopted the architecture and coined their own: EM64T. So, Microsoft came up with a compromise and started calling it x64.

> It was called AMD64 when AMD and Microsoft designed it,

The original name was x86-64. Quoting myself (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36075840):

> I still shake my head at how they were able to successfully rebrand it from amd64 to x86-64

It's the opposite: the original name was x86-64, and amd64 is a later rebranding. See, for instance, the original web site for this (then) new architecture: https://web.archive.org/web/20000829042251/http://www.x86-64...

Yes, but that doesn't contradict with what I said. AMD had pivoted to "AMD64" soon after and that was before Intel had released their own name: EM64T. Microsoft coined x64 around that time, probably found it more marketable than x86-64, becuase they had used it in commercial branding such as "Windows XP Professional x64 Edition" too. (They couldn't call Windows XP "64-bit edition" because that term was used for their Itanium-based (IA64) products).

Intel originally named it "IA-32e" to try to make it sound it was just a small extension on the 32bit x86 architecture whereas the Itanium IA-64 architecture was the future.

Never heard of that one, but yeah, Intel was very hesitant to admit that IA-64, was, indeed, not the future.

The post says '64-bit x86 ("x86-64" or "x64")' which is also roughly what the first sentence of Wikipedia has to say about it. I personally picked it just because it was shorter to type and easily understood in context.

X64 is, only beaten by Intel 64, the worst name for the architecture.

x86 is short for 8086 family instruction set architecture, and x64 is short for x86-64. Makes sense to me and follows the same pattern.

The Grief over the use of x64 for AMD64 or X86-64 is based in the prior use of "x64" for the DEC Alpha architecture in the hardware naming: "DECchip 21x64" [0]

Digital was earlier to market the Alpha as a 64 bit ISA than either Intel's Itanium ( IA-64) or AMD's x86-64 which is also called AMD64 [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Alpha

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit_computing

My understanding is that these were never just called "x64" though, or at least not commonly.

My vote is for x32.

(you didn't know? https://wiki.debian.org/X32Port)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com