Oh, good point, I had forgotten about SledgeHammer and its descendants. Intel had to pull some shady stuff to not lose a lot of market-share while the extracted themselves from the NetBurst dead-end.
It's sad that many places call it x86_64 while it's actually amd64. If Itanium had been a success and AMD built such chips, they wouldn't call it aa64 but ia64 like the existing name. Hence, it would only be fair to keep calling it AMD64. I don't know if it's just Intel not being comfortable with selling CPUs that implement AMD64. Maybe that's why we have ARM64 and AArch64 for the same thing, one vendor neutral, one with ARM in it. I really don't understand what's so wrong with giving credit. It's not like Intel's shareholders would care.
Yeah, but given the various names others came up for it, it would have been nice to have one short name. It's normal for difference to exist even withing revisions of a chip, so it wouldn't have hurt anyone to use one name, When we say x86, we mean everything Intel from the 1980s until now, including Cyrix, AMD, Via, etc. 32bit or 64bit.
