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Re: [ping] Re: proper name of i386/x86-64/etc targets
- From: Michael Matz <matz at suse dot de>
- To: Sandra Loosemore <sandra at codesourcery dot com>
- Cc: rth at redhat dot com, hubicka at ucw dot cz, ubizjak at gmail dot com, GCC Development <gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org>
- Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 15:07:25 +0100 (CET)
- Subject: Re: [ping] Re: proper name of i386/x86-64/etc targets
- Authentication-results: sourceware.org; auth=none
- References: <54A5E698 dot 60702 at codesourcery dot com> <54BDBCF0 dot 9050801 at codesourcery dot com>
Hi,
On Mon, 19 Jan 2015, Sandra Loosemore wrote:
> > I'd be happy to work on a patch to bring the manual to using a common
> > naming convention, but what should it be? Wikipedia seems to use
> > "x86" (lowercase) to refer to the entire family of architectures
> > (including the original 16-bit variants), "IA-32" for the 32-bit
> > architecture (I believe that is Intel's official name), and "x86-64"
> > (with a dash instead of underscore) for the 64-bit architecture. But
> > of course the target maintainers should have the final say on what
> > names to use.
>
> Ping? Any thoughts?
ia32 is confusing because ia64 (a well known term) sounds related but
can't be farther away from it, and it's also vendor specific. Our
traditional i386 seems better to me (although it has its own problems, but
I'm not aware of any better abbreviation in the wild that's vendor neutral
and specifically means the 32bit incarnation of the x86 architecture).
Ciao,
Michael.