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technical differences

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by layre

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What are the architectural differences of an AMD chip running a programme designed for Pentium chip usage? Are there any associated problems with running that programme on AMD chip. What are the technical(architectural) differences between AMD chip and Pentium chip?

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by liquidcoolit

I have used AMD chips for YEARS and never had any problem. The architecture has to be the same for compatibility reasons. They both have the same registers inside to perform the same function. Its just that AMD are far superior in that respect (My Opinion :-).

Cheers ....

by layre

Didn't give me enough technical info. on differences between the AMD chip and Pentium chip and didn't answer whether AMD could run a Pentium based programme effectively.

by phiw

This may be information you already know, but *I*have*been*told* at one point that the AMD chips are implementations of a unique architecture running their own microcode to emulate the Intel instruction set. This is supposedly why they do some things faster and some slower. Benchmark utilities and other software written for Intel only will see the Intel instruction set, so they should run almost identically. The small differences, mainly limited to slight changes in performance in terms of speed, will be because the same instructions are taking slightly modified times to execute due to different internal algorithms. I've heard this is supposed to be how it works at an abstract level anyway; are you looking for any specific details? The only differences I have heard of at the application level had more to do with optimization than actual problems. Hope this helps...

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