WE REPORTED LAST MONTH that AMD has a cunning plan to work with Microsoft on 64-bit security. And, at the time, we also reported that Intel had no plans to implement this stuff itself. The technique won"t be implemented until Microsoft XP service pack 2 becomes available.
But now it seems that Intel is going to the buffer overflow party too. According to Mike Kanellos, writing on news.com, or MSNBC as it appears to be called now, Intel will intro a similar technique in its "Prescottia" Pentium 4 chips. We"re not sure about that. Intel Prescott"s New "Louis Burns" Instructions, here, does not seem to suggest the NX bit is supported. Intel"s Itanium, however, has had this feature built in since day one. So perhaps it"s fairer to say AMD is following Intel here.
In any case, Intel is refusing to discuss the matter right now. If it is in "Planet Prescottia", this would be a "good thing". The same article on news.com suggests that Unreal Tournament 64 will be released in the first quarter of this year. But the AMD Mister that Mike talked to didn"t say when we could expect Windows for AMD64. Could it be that AMD doesn"t know when it will be released? We think we should be told.