Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[CombJelly]

"what is incrementally involved in adding 64 bit extensions to the Athlon?"

I would be very surprised if you don't have it backwards, i.e. Paris is actually a Hammer. It would be a lot of work to port Barton to SOI (although they may have already done a lot of this) and put the memory controller, crossbar and HTT port(s) on the die, given that Paris is supposed to be Socket754. And the work would be pretty pointless, the die wouldn't be very much smaller than a Hammer core. Unless, of course, they have already done much of the work back in the days when Barton was supposed to be SOI...

The thing that I don't understand is why this would exist at all. It makes no sense (to me, at least) why they would continue with 32 bit processors. The more 64 bit capable processors out there, the better. Otherwise they risk giving software companies a reason not to port software to 64 bits.