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Athlon 64: How AMD turned the tables on Intel

Better 32-bit performance was worth trading some 64-bit performance to get

With the Athlon 64, AMD pulled x86 kicking and screaming into the world of 64-bit, dragging Intel along with it.Even in 2001, x86 had decades of baggage attached to it. AMD bet that there would be appeal in a 64-bit architecture that was fully backward compatible with x86 and natively ran 32-bit applications at full speed. I can’t talk a lot about the job, but I was administering a mission critical system that ran on Windows, mostly on Dell hardware.

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