Items tagged with x86-64
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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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