On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 6:07 AM, Michael Matz <m...@suse.de> wrote: > 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). >
The problem with i386 is it is a real processor. When someone says i386, it isn't clear if it means the processor or 32-bit x86. -- H.J.
