Why Intel's Prescott will use AMD64 extensions

ONE OF THE the biggest stories out of the AMD launch comes not from AMD itself, but from Intel, or at least about Intel. Since we told you about Prescott being 64 bit last week (see here), the burning question in everyone's mind is what instruction set will they use? Would it be Itanic, AMD64, something new and different, or one changed just enough to be incompatible like SSE and 3DNow were.

If you think Intel would eat its own shoes before it adopted AMD64, guess again, it will be compatible with AMD64. If you doubt this, think about one thing, why this is happening. It is not Intel's doing, not by a long shot. While it may use a different name, like the old x86-64, or even Extended x86, it will run all the software that AMD does. Mmmmm, shoes are tasty.

So, why is this again? Simple, MS. Microsoft will not support a different 64 bit platform, and frankly I don't blame it, it costs a lot of money to do that. MS gave Intel the choice, support AMD's instruction set, or do without Windows. MS won that battle pretty handily.