2003 server - Sunday, March 2, 2008 1:14 - 0 Comments

Windows reports AMD on Intel hardware

How Windows reports 64-bit hardware.

So you buy a nice, new 64-bit Intel EM64T box and you install Windows Server 2003 64-bit Enterprise Edition on it. Then you happen to be browsing the registry and find PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE under HKLMSYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSession ManagerEnvironment and notice that it has the value AMD64 instead of EM64T. What’s going on?

Well, it turns out (for somewhat mysterious reasons) that *all* 64-bit hardware on which you install Windows Server 2003 displays AMD64 as the processor architecture, regardless of whether it’s x86-64, x64, AMD64, EM64T or whatever. So don’t get confused and think that Intel has suddenly been acquired by AMD!

Article written by MyComputerAid.com