Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[Petz]

There's no reason to totally degrade the 64-bit capabilities of Athlon 64. A chip can still be AMD64-compatible even if it can't be connected to more than 4 GB of memory. The logical address space is still 48 bits (or whatver AMD64 says), while physically there's only enough address pins for 4G of memory.

This kind of "castrated Athlon 64" makes eminent sense to me. It would still run Windows 64 in 64-bit mode!
It would still be 2x faster in benchmarks like DivX!
The extra registers will still speed up code by 10-20% for software that uses them.


Petz