amd64 ?!

[Roland Smith]

On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 04:56:26PM -0400, kalin m wrote:
> hi all...
> 
> i have dilemma.
> 
> i asked a hosting faclity to set up freebsd 7 on  new server.  and i 
> mentioned that it should be 64 bit.
> now they when i get into the machine i get:
> srv391# uname -a
> FreeBSD srv391.carpathiahost.com 7.0-RELEASE FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE #0: Sun 
> Feb 24 10:35:36 UTC 2008     
> root at driscoll.cse.buffalo.edu:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  amd64
> 
> i did ask for an intel machine and the dmseg actually states:
> 
> CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           E5405  @ 2.00GHz (1997.01-MHz K8-class 
> CPU)
>  Origin = "GenuineIntel"  Id = 0x10676  Stepping = 6

>  AMD Features=0x20100800<SYSCALL,NX,LM>
>  AMD Features2=0x1<LAHF>
> 
> so i'm a bit confused about the the 64 bit and why the machine is 
> identifying itself as amd64 and not i686?

Well, "amd64" is the name FreeBSD uses for the 64-bit architecture built
by AMD as en extension of the 32-bit x86 architecture. Intel later made
it's chips compatible because it's own 64-bit architecture IA64 was more
or less a dud. 

This architecture is also known as x86_64.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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