[M3devel] target naming again..DJGPP?

[Neil Thomas Dantam]

hendrik at topoi.pooq.com wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 07:26:03PM -0400, Tony Hosking wrote:
>> Umm...
>>
>> zed 51 $ uname -a
>> Linux zed.cs.purdue.edu 2.6.23.16 #2 SMP Mon Feb 11 13:01:13 EST 2008
>> x86_64 Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5310 @ 1.60GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux
>
> Interesting. I'm running Debian etch on a real AMD processor. Could it
> be you have a 64-bit Intel processor? Could there be a subtle
> difference between the processors? Or might you be using a different
> Linux distribution, that might use different terminology?

My understanding of these names are as follows:
- AMD started calling it's new architecture x86_64
- The Linux Kernel chose to call it's support for the the
architecture x86_64
- AMD then changed the architecture name to AMD64 so that they could
trademark it
- Some Linux Distributions choose to call the architecture AMD64,
perhaps to give credit to AMD
- Sun and Microsoft marketing call the architecture x64, perhaps
just to be contrary

The instruction set should be the same for Intel and AMD, modulo
extensions like SSE3/4 and virtualization. The differing names are
the result of AMD changing the name of the architecture and different
developers choosing to use the original or modified name.

Also, for linux kernel version "2.6.18-3-amd64", the "-3-amd64" part
is a patch version tag added by the distribution maintainer.

--
Neil