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Most of the barriers for Alpha adoption were problems inherent in the 32-bit to 64-bit transition. Alignment problems, yes, but another killer problem was that 64-bit pointers were twice as large.

The software I was writing at the time (EDA) took almost exactly twice as much memory. So if we needed more than 4GB, we could go to a 64-bit machine, but unless you bought even more than 8GB, you couldn't really run on bigger problems.

As you note, all those problems had to be sorted out 10 years later, when AMD finally forced Intel's hand into selling 64-bit computers.

by somat10 hours ago|

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AMD only pressured Intel into adapting the 64-bit extensions to the x86 architecture, The Intel native 64-bit system was the Itanium. Which they were hoping would break x86 and it's messy open legacy that allowed AMD to profit off it.

A question on terminology, I come from bsd world so prefer i386, amd64, ia64(the itanium) whereas the linux side appears to prefer x86 x86-64 Nothing wrong with it(it describes the architecture fine) but I assume that x86-64 is intel face saving propaganda.

by aleph_minus_one9 hours ago|

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> A question on terminology, I come from bsd world so prefer i386, amd64, ia64(the itanium) whereas the linux side appears to prefer x86 x86-64 Nothing wrong with it(it describes the architecture fine) but I assume that x86-64 is intel face saving propaganda.

There exist two different (and slightly incompatible) implementations of 64-bit x86, which the respective CPU vendors call AMD64 and Intel 64 (previous names of the latter: EM64T and IA-32e).

So, what Intel implements is not AMD64, but something slightly different.

Concerning the small incompatibilities between AMD64 and Intel 64, see for example

> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29833938/what-is-the-com...

by 7 hours ago|

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by hakfoo1 hours ago|

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If you go far back enough "x86-64" was the original unbranded name. I wrote to AMD back at the time and they sent me a 5-volume set of programmer's reference manuals labelled x86-64, dated 2002.