[dlee7283]

I was wondering since it is apparent that the 32 bit architecture is favored and still preferred by developers over 64 bit I was wondering if developers could possibly find a way to take advantage of instruction sets instead

Say like a game comes out and their is a specialized build for AMD processors and one for Intel ones. I remember back in the day their was a browser that was built around different instructions sets yet it seemed to never catch on

I am wondering if this would be a good idea or just empty smoke?

 

[Shadow_UGZ]

They could although newer instruction sets don't really have anything to offer for gaming (unlike 3Dnow!), I could be wrong though. From what I have seen SSE4 is a mostly multimedia oriented instruction set. Even SSE5 won't have much to offer to make a difference in most applications.

When you talk about specialized builds I think you mean when Intel and AMD had slightly different instruction sets or maybe when AMD released x86-64 and 64bit builds were labeled AMD64. Nowadays chips from both manufacturers pretty much support the same thing and if they don't the compiled programs takes care of that. Ex: If AMD doesn't support an instruction and an Intel chip does, the code will make the Intel CPU take the "faster" code path that uses the instruction set while AMD takes the "slower" path that does not support it. Both CPUs will do the same thing although at different speeds and using a different method.

64 bit on the other hand enables chips to support more memory and have double the registers. From what I have seen in the past week of studying MIPS assembly language (actually storing values in registers by hand) is that 64bit can bring a lot of improvements in applications that process lots of data.