Why are 64-bit distros often called ‘amd64’?

I am downloading an ISO image of Lubuntu; they have two versions: 32 and 64.

But why do they call the 64 version amd64 since they say that it works for Intel also?

Answers:

Thank you for visiting the Q&A section on Magenaut. Please note that all the answers may not help you solve the issue immediately. So please treat them as advisements. If you found the post helpful (or not), leave a comment & I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Method 1

Because AMD was the first one to release 64-bit x86 (x86-64) CPUs.

the AMD64 architecture was positioned by AMD from the beginning as an evolutionary way to add 64-bit computing capabilities to the existing x86 architecture, as opposed to Intel’s approach of creating an entirely new 64-bit architecture with IA-64.

The first AMD64-based processor, the Opteron, was released in April 2003.

In fact, in the kernel the 64-bit support is called ‘x86_64’ to refer to the fact that both AMD and Intel (and others) implement those instructions.

Method 2

AMD intially implemented x86-64, before Intel. For this reason, most distros (and other OSs such as OpenBSD) did a first release when it was still AMD only, or renaming to x86-64 wasn’t considered worth the effort.

I think one of the another contributing factors to this naming confusion was a conflict between Intel and AMD over naming. Intel had an identity crisis in it’s 64-bit naming. It cycled through the names EM64T, IA-32e, and finally the official Intel 64. AMD on the other hand always called it AMD64. x86-64 was a fairly obvious name to cover both. However, it wasn’t always like this. I remember when it was new and shiny people couldn’t figure out what to call it. I’ve seen these:

• x64 — ambiguous between Itanium and x86-64
• IA64 — again, ambiguous with Itanium
• amd64 — what you see now
• EM64T — rare, but I’ve seen it before used to refer to both AMD and Intel

x86-64 is the obvious best short name for the architecture

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0