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Comment by deaddodo | Hacker News Reader

I still shake my head at how they were able to successfully rebrand it from amd64 to x86-64; yet ia32 is still semi-accepted as the "official" name of x86.

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> I still shake my head at how they were able to successfully rebrand it from amd64 to x86-64

It's the opposite: the original name was x86-64, and amd64 is a later rebranding. See, for instance, the original web site for this (then) new architecture: https://web.archive.org/web/20000829042251/http://www.x86-64...

Without going through various repos, I'm struggling to recall ever even seeing "x86-64" - It's always amd64 that I look for - so the rebrand wasn't that successful.

I remember it a fair bit right after 64 bit became mainstream. In the excitement phase it was generally amd64 then as it became fully established and adopted it was most often referred to as x86-64, at least in the press.

I think both are pretty common. E.g. uname -a says x86_64 and GCC/Clang use x86-64 for defining the target while, on the other hand, MSVC (and a lot of Microsoft stuff in general) uses amd64 as do many BSDs.

> MSVC (and a lot of Microsoft stuff in general) uses amd64 as do many BSDs.

That's partly because Microsoft had support for ia32 (x86) and ia64 (Itanium). So amd64 was to differentiate the architecture (and it was unclear Intel would ever extend x86).

Debian-based systems are slightly confused with dpkg architecture returning amd64 and uname returning x86_64.

Compiler explorer (godbolt.org) uses x86-64, as do the man pages for gcc and clang. I suspect there are plenty of other places too.

But my filesystem is full of references like /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu

It makes it clearly different from arm64 at least, which may be part of it.

AMD64 is specific to AMD, then Intel released EM64T. x86-64 is the common subset between the two.

It was IA-32e, terrible name

amd64 was an attempt to "brand" the 64-bit version of x86, just as ia32 was an attempt to "brand" the 32-bit version of x86. Many people rejected both and just say x86 and x86-64 as generic names.

> amd64 was an attempt to "brand" the 64-bit version of x86

The "64-bit version of x86" is actually the new ISA created by AMD that was backwards compatible with x86 and added a 64-bit mode.

I'm sure that you agree that the company that creates a ISA has the right to name it.

They have every right to say what they'd rather it be called, and others have every right to ignore them and use a generic name if they prefer.

I get the opposite impression: amd64 is something I see quite often, while ia32 is pretty much exclusively referred to as x86. (Even though for the average user, ia32 would be much easier to recognize as "32-bit", and amd64 as "64-bit", both of which are often found on download buttons.)

Don’t forget arm64 which is now appearing.

Yup, I've misread and confused the two too many times

x86-64 was the original name by AMD, they rebranded it shortly before commercial availability to AMD64. Kernels and compilers had already been updated at that time and just kept the "old" name.

I’m not sure they’ve been successful. The string amd64 is everywhere.

Earlier today I used `arch -x86_64` on my mac to run something in Rosetta (Intel mode)

amd64 looks much too similar to arm64 (though that's the latter's fault)

there'a also `aarch64`

arm64's official name is AArch64

I don't think that's the case anymore. at the very least they are interchangeable names, and I believe that "arm64" is the name going forward.

I read this somewhere a couple weeks back, but I don't remember the source.

https://developer.arm.com/architectures mentions AArch64, no mention of arm64. There's "A64" for the instruction set, and https://developer.arm.com/Architectures/A64%20Instruction%20... also mentions the various armv8-* names, but still no mention of arm64.

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