Chip firm AMD introduced hard details of its Hammer 64-bit family at the Microprocessor Forum in San Jose yesterday and early indications are this one"s a winner.
The architecture Dirk Meyer and his team has put together will eventually migrate to desktops and notebook platforms. As noted here some weeks ago, Hammer has an integrated North Bridge but it is AMD"s plans for migrating the chip which are likely to breach a hole in Intel"s own, somewhat controversial, 64-bit strategy. The eighth generation architecture which uses the specification for X86-64 which appears at This site executes 32 and 64-bit code natively, so migration doesn"t involve the kind of investment that Intel ISVs will have to make. Like Intel, however, 64-bit applications may be a little slow in coming, with the first ones likely to be database and scientific applications, which more readily take advantage of the additional addressing structure.