Intel Core Duo

[mark at buttery.org (Mark J. Dulcey)]

Jerry Feldman wrote:

> Not all the
> Core Duos are 64-bit, but I believe that based on my prior research
> that Intel is now only producing 64-bit chips. Unlike AMD, Intel's
> chip names do not include 64. You could get a Pentium with 32-bits or
> 64-bits. AMD on the other hand markets their chips as Turion64 or
> Athlon64.

The short guide to Intel and 64 bits:

1. All Core 2 series chips are 64-bit.

2. All Pentium D chips are 64-bit.

3. The Core Duo and Core Solo (not to be confused with Core 2 Duo) are 
NOT 64-bit capable. They're really revised versions of the Pentium-M, 
which was based on the same microarchitecture as the Pentium 3. These 
are mostly found in laptops, though there were a few desktop systems, 
notably the first generation of Intel-based iMac and Mac Mini.

4. The Pentium-M and Pentium 3 are not 64-bit.

5. To the best of my knowledge, no Celeron to date has 64-bit 
capability. Eventually, Intel will likely shut down production of all 
CPUs not based on the Core 2 architecture, and will start making Core 2 
Celerons; those will presumably be 64-bit capable unless they choose to 
disable it on purpose. (Also note that the somewhat misleadingly-named 
Celeron D is NOT a dual-core processor.)

6. SOME Pentium 4 chips are 64-bit capable. This is where you'll have to 
check the individual chip number.

As for virtualization support, I believe that all Core 2 series chips 
have it. Some of the previous generation of Xeon chips (the Pentium 4 
variants designed for servers) also did. So far as I know, other Intel 
chips don't. Virtualization is possible on CPUs that lack the special 
support (VMware has been doing it for years), but it won't run quite as 
well.

Unless you're building a seriously budget-constrained system or 
upgrading an existing box, the only Intel CPUs I would recommend buying 
at this time are the Core 2 Duo series, or the quad-core members of the 
family if you have money to burn.

AMD indeed makes life easier, though not quite perfectly. Anything 
called an Opteron or anything with 64 in its name is 64-bit capable. But 
there is also the Sempron series. Current Semprons are really Athlon64 
chips with reduced cache, and are 64-bit capable. But the first 
generation of Sempron chips based on the AMD64 architecture had the 
64-bit capability disabled; fortunately, there aren't a lot of those out 
there.

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