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64-Bit Computing: A silent revolution? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I was recently reading Tracy Kidder's excellent book Soul of a New Machine.

The author pointed out what a big deal the transition to 32-Bit computing was.

However, in the last 20 years, I don't really remember a big fuss being made of most computers going to 64-bit as a de facto standard. Why is this?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

It depends on what you meant by 64bit computing, which is not the same as x86 becoming a 64bit architecture.

FWIW, 64 bit computing had been a thing for a very long time in the supercomputer/mainframe space since the 70s. And high end microprocessors had supported 64bit since the early 90s.

So by the time AMD introduced x86_64 there had been about a quarter century of 64bit computing ;-)

It was a big deal for x86 vendors, though. As that is when x86 took over most of the datacenter and workstation markets.