Intel's recent release of their 64-bit supporting Pentium 4 6xx series processors has been a long time coming. With these processors, we've seen the desktop launch of Intel's EM64T Technology. Today, MBReview has posted up an article detailing some of the core architecture modifications that have been made by Intel, ranging from registers to instructions. If you're interested in what's going on at the architecture level with these new 64-bit capable processors, be sure take a look!
"The main additions to the IA-32 architecture lie with the need for additional 64-bit registers. Intel has added eight new general purpose registers, along with eight 128-bit Streaming SIMD Extension registers. The pre-existing general purpose registers have all been widened to 64-bits as well. With these new registers comes a new opcode prefix, REX. The defaults for 64-bit mode allow for a 64-bit address size, and a 32-bit operand size."
Direct Link:
http://www.mbreview.com/em64t.php
Intel EM64T Technology Article
23rd March 2005, 01:25
Intel EM64T Technology Article 
