AMD64 vs i386/x86

[Christopher Chan]

On Thursday, February 18, 2010 05:54 AM, J wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 16:44, Odd<iodine at runbox.no>  wrote:
>> Some time ago, we were discussing which was faster. Some said the bigger
>> foot print of AMD64 instructions makes it slower than x86. This article is
>> interesting:
>>
>> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_32_pae&num=1
>
> Just to clear some confusion, that article is comparing stock 32bit,
> 32bit w/ PAE, and x86_64 kernels, it is NOT comparing the AMD64
> processor line to Intel's x86 processor line ;-)

There was a time when Intel's EMT64 cpus needed PAE which meant they 
were slower than AMD64 cpus for certain apps iirc.

>
> FWIW, both of these, IMHO do better than the IA64 from Intel... but my
> experience on IA64 systems is limited, thankfully.
>

Apparently AMD64/EMT64 cpus caught up to Itanium-2 processors in 
performance but that was just hearsay. But their support of 32-bit 
binaries is abysmal.