laurent.artaud[AT]free.fr <"laurent.artaud[AT]free.fr"> wrote:
> BUT, being a x86 compatible processor, it MUST have 32 bits registers 
> and ALU. Using 64 bits registers with a 32 bits ALU is STUPID, so if the 
> Athlon-XP had been build with 64 bits registers and ALU, be sure that 
> they would have advertised about it (just as they are now about the 
> Athlon-64...).

  This is true for the *CPU*. However, it's not the CPU which handles
the floating point code, but the FPU.
  The FPU is completely separate from the CPU. The FPU has eight 80-bit
registers and it performs all floating point operations on them. I don't
know, however, if the FPU is able to load 64 and 80-bit floats directly
from memory, but I wouldn't be surprised if it could (actually I'm not
sure how wide the memory bus is in athlons, but I would be surprised
if it was narrower than 64 bits).
  My point was, thus, that the CPU being a 32-bit architecture doesn't
necessarily mean the FPU is limited to handling only 32 bits wide
values at a time.

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