Items tagged with x86-64
Always-connected Windows 10 PCs powered by Arm processors have plenty of potential as nice portable workstations with other-worldly battery life. Every time we've tested one of these machines, starting with the Surface Pro X, we've come away impressed with battery life while maintaining adequate performance for most tasks. The issue, however, has been one of app compatibility. These machines simply can't run 64-bit x86 applications, but Microsoft is set to change that for Windows 10 Insiders starting next month. Microsoft's Chief Product Officer for Windows, Panos Panay, announced in a post on the Windows Experience blog that Arm-powered Windows 10 PCs will get a shot of x64 emulation....
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ARM debuted its new 64-bit microarchitecture today and announced the upcoming launch of a new set of Cortex processors, due in 2014. The two new chips, dubbed the Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A57, are the most advanced CPUs the British company has ever designed, and are integral to AMD's plans to drive dense server applications beginning in 2014. When AMD designed x86-64, its engineers took the opportunity to remove some cruft from the venerable IA-32 standard and cleaned up the implementation while maintaining backward compatibility. With ARMv8, ARM has done something similar. The ARMv7 uarch was designed to scale across three different markets with very different needs as far as power consumption...
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After more than six months of high-to-mid profile executive departures, AMD has major news to announce on its new executive hire -- and he's a welcome addition. Starting today, Jim Keller will serve as a vice president and the company's Chief Architect for CPU Cores. Keller has spent more than thirty years in the semiconductor business, including a few at AMD. When AMD brought members of DEC's Alpha team aboard in the late 1990s, Keller was one of the CPU architects that came along. Having worked on Alpha's EV5, Jim was lead architect on the first K8 project (the first iteration of K8 was eventually canceled and Fred Weber became lead architect on the design that came to market). Keller moved...
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A new security post at the Xen.org community blog warns Intel users to patch their operating systems or risk falling prey to a particular type of escalation vulnerability. What makes this warning unique is that it's not related to a software problem only effects Intel users running 64-bit operating systems. This is an issue that affects Windows (Microsoft has released a patch) and may affect netBSD, FreeBSD, and OSX as well. The overwhelming majority of end users have never had to worry about the difference between AMD's implementation of its x86-64 standard and Intel's later copy, but there are subtle differences between the two. In this particular case, one of those differences turns out to...
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HP and Oracle have been slugging it out in court over the future of Intel's Itanium for months now. HP has just widened the front by asking the EU to investigate whether Oracle acted improperly when it terminated support for Intel's Itanium. HP claims that Oracle is improperly leveraging its software market to compel purchases of its own hardware, while Oracle maintains that Itanium is essentially a zombie chip. Just the Facts HP sued Oracle after the software company announced it would stop building software for Itanium. According to Bill Wohl, HP's chief communications officer, the two companies share ~140,000 customers. The lawsuit is an attempt to enforce what HP believes are contractual...
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