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0 pointsithkuil8y ago0 comments

I must say I didn't go to look at the sources of the patch, but what you say sounds so odd that I'll take the chance and suggest that perhaps the fact that in golang "amd64" is, for historical reasons, the name of the architecture more neutrally known as "x86_64", is the source of confusion (I.e. it doesn't just work on AMD or on CPUs that claim/report having a specific model/maker etc).

Low level syscall ABI is architecture dependent.

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laumars8y ago

AMD64 refers to both Intel and AMD chipsets that are 64bit x86. While you are right that there is also the term "x86_64" in common use, AMD64 is the actually more standard name (as well as the term specifically used in the Go ecosystem eg $GOARCH env var and build parameters for cross platform sources)

Further to that point, I didn't detect any confusion from others in this thread that AMD64 excluded Intel chips. Where they were talking about AMD64 specific code they were saying that Go code targeting other architectures (eg arm, mips, s390x and ppc - to name a few. Go supports an impressive number of architectures[1]) would still use their respective fork() code rather than this new fix.

[1] https://golang.org/doc/install/source#introduction

linkregister8y ago

amd64 is the original name of the instruction set. Intel did beat AMD to a 64-bit instruction set: that of the Itanium processors, IA-64. Itanium had performance issues and lots of errata. Most importantly, IA-64 was not natively backwards-compatible with x86 instructions. amd64 became the standard.

x86_64 is a common name for the amd64 architecture, and is a way to describe both the AMD and Intel implementations. In my opinion, amd64 is a less ambiguous name and is more historically accurate.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64

Yes, I am aware that my point is undercut by the fact that the article title is x86-64, but I stand by my statement.

cesarb8y ago

It's not just the article title. Follow the two footnotes in the "History" section of that article, to the press releases from AMD announcing the new ISA. They consistently call it "AMD x86-64" or "AMD's x86-64" or just "x86-64". The oldest snapshot I could find of the x86-64 web site (https://web.archive.org/web/20000817014037/http://www.x86-64...) also calls it x86-64. The most recent snapshot of that site, however, calls it AMD64; it seems to have changed sometime in the middle of April 2003.

That is, both x86-64 and AMD64 are historically accurate (2003 was early enough in the ISA's lifetime), but x86-64 is the earlier name.

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