64-bit – AMD technology for Intel CPUs (PCGH-Retro, August 4)

… 1998: 3dfx is not only known to regular readers of PCGH. But did you know that 3dfx technology is even in a Sega console? No, neither does she. But that’s only because Sega decided very late against 3dfx and in favor of NEC/Videologic’s Infinite Planes technology. But the 3dfx lawyers didn’t want to let the matter rest and insisted on valid preliminary contracts – with success: on this fourth of August they agreed with Sega on a compensation payment of 10.5 million US dollars, according to the website kotaku. A hearty saying is also given there, with which a 3dfx employee is said to have reacted to the out-of-court settlement: “That’s right bitch. Wish we didn’t need to break Sonic’s legs to get it.”

… 2004: After winning the gigahertz race, this is a rather moral victory for AMD against arch-rival Intel: On August 4, 2004, Intel quietly and secretly introduces the Pentium 4 3.60F, initially only for the OEM market. What is special about this CPU: The chip with a Prescott core has a new function called EM64T for the first time. This is a 64-bit extension of the x86 command set, which does not originally come from Intel, but from AMD – there it was introduced long before that with the Athlon 64 under the name AMD 64, a name that Intel naturally does not can take over. EM64T stands for “Extended Memory 64 Technology”, after all the main advantage is the usability of more than 4 GiByte RAM. People don’t seem to be too happy with this name either, and Intel will soon rename the function less cryptically to “Intel 64”. But no matter under what name: It remains an AMD technology that Intel is only allowed to use because of a license exchange agreement with the competitor; For the first time, Intel has adopted an important technology for its own x86 processors from a competitor. The 64-bit function remains hidden from most customers anyway, because it can only be used with a suitable operating system – and Microsoft’s Windows XP in the x64 edition is not yet on the market.

… 2006: In times of increasingly lax handling of the subject of data protection, an incident from 2006 may not seem as outrageous as it did back then. On August 4th, an employee of the AOL research department posts a compressed but unencrypted file on his website, which is to be used for a research project. The Content: About 20 million searches from 650,000 AOL users over a period of three months. The explosive thing: The file is unencrypted and allows the search query to be used to identify the user. AOL reacted – much too late for the speed of the Internet – on August 7th and took the now widespread file offline. While a few years later such an “oversight” elicited little more than a one-liner and an apologetic statement from the company, in 2006 the consequences are significant. AOL Chief Technology Officer Maureen Govern resigns in August and September 2006 sees a Class action lawsuit against AOL – 5,000 US dollars are demanded per injured party.