64-bit Computing - Current 64-bit Microprocessor Architectures

Current 64-bit Microprocessor Architectures

64-bit microprocessor architectures for which processors are currently being manufactured (as of January 2011) include:

• The 64-bit extension created by AMD to Intel's x86 architecture (later licensed by Intel); commonly known as "x86-64", "AMD64", or "x64":
  • AMD's AMD64 extensions (used in Athlon 64, Opteron, Sempron, Turion 64, Phenom, Athlon II and Phenom II processors)
  • Intel's Intel 64 extensions (used in newer Celeron, Pentium, and Xeon processors, in Intel Core 2/i3/i5/i7 processors, and in some Atom processors)
  • VIA Technologies' 64-bit extensions, used in the VIA Nano processors
• The 64-bit version of the Power Architecture:
  • IBM's POWER6 and POWER7 processors
  • IBM's PowerPC 970 processor
  • The Cell Broadband Engine used in the PlayStation 3, designed by IBM, Toshiba and Sony, combines a 64-bit Power architecture processor with seven or eight Synergistic Processing Elements.
  • IBM's "Xenon" processor used in the Microsoft Xbox 360 comprises three 64-bit PowerPC cores.
• SPARC V9 architecture:
  • Sun's UltraSPARC processors
  • Fujitsu's SPARC64 processors
• IBM's z/Architecture, a 64-bit version of the ESA/390 architecture, used in IBM's eServer zSeries and System z mainframes
• Intel's IA-64 architecture (used in Itanium processors)
• MIPS Technologies' MIPS64 architecture
• MMIX

Most 64-bit processor architectures that are derived from 32-bit processor architectures can execute code for the 32-bit version of the architecture natively without any performance penalty. This kind of support is commonly called bi-arch support or more generally multi-arch support.