Current 64-bit Microprocessor Architectures
64-bit microprocessor architectures for which processors are currently being manufactured (as of January 2011) include:
- The 64-bit extension created by AMD to Intel's x86 architecture (later licensed by Intel); commonly known as "x86-64", "AMD64", or "x64":
- AMD's AMD64 extensions (used in Athlon 64, Opteron, Sempron, Turion 64, Phenom, Athlon II and Phenom II processors)
- Intel's Intel 64 extensions (used in newer Celeron, Pentium, and Xeon processors, in Intel Core 2/i3/i5/i7 processors, and in some Atom processors)
- VIA Technologies' 64-bit extensions, used in the VIA Nano processors
- The 64-bit version of the Power Architecture:
- IBM's POWER6 and POWER7 processors
- IBM's PowerPC 970 processor
- The Cell Broadband Engine used in the PlayStation 3, designed by IBM, Toshiba and Sony, combines a 64-bit Power architecture processor with seven or eight Synergistic Processing Elements.
- IBM's "Xenon" processor used in the Microsoft Xbox 360 comprises three 64-bit PowerPC cores.
- SPARC V9 architecture:
- Sun's UltraSPARC processors
- Fujitsu's SPARC64 processors
- IBM's z/Architecture, a 64-bit version of the ESA/390 architecture, used in IBM's eServer zSeries and System z mainframes
- Intel's IA-64 architecture (used in Itanium processors)
- MIPS Technologies' MIPS64 architecture
- MMIX
Most 64-bit processor architectures that are derived from 32-bit processor architectures can execute code for the 32-bit version of the architecture natively without any performance penalty. This kind of support is commonly called bi-arch support or more generally multi-arch support.
Read more about this topic: 64-bit Computing
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