Prescott 64-bit? (Inq story)

[Lonyo]

I know it's been posted on Processors forum, but not everyone goes there

Inq story

You never know, maybe it's true . Maybe some day Anand could try and investigate these rumours and tell us something concrete

 

[Schadenfroh]

what like some sort of emulator?

 

[Pandaren]

what like some sort of emulator?

No. Someone analyzed a bunch of photos of the Prescott die, and noted that there were many aspects of it that made it appear that it has 64-bit capability.

Chip Architect

The Inquirer might seem like a shaddy source, but they were correct about HT being already in the Pentium 4 architecture some years ago. More often than not, there are grains of truth in what they report, so I am inclined to beleive that Prescott has 64-bit extensions that are inactive.

It makes sense if you think about it. The Prescott core will be used in Xeon processors. Xeons, being workstation and server procs, run more memory intensive apps than most people need, and although they have a special extension to access more than 4GB of RAM, it is a somewhat kludgy method. It would make sense for Intel to rectify this problem by giving Xeons a better way to access more memory.