2 Supported Processors and Motherboards

Since mid-2003 FreeBSD/amd64 has supported the AMD64 (“Hammer”) and Intel EM64T architecture, and is now one of the Tier-1 platforms (fully supported architecture), which are expected to be Production Quality with respects to all aspects of the FreeBSD operating system, including installation and development environments.

Note that there are two names for this architecture, AMD64 (AMD) and Intel EM64T (Extended Memory 64-bit Technology). 64-bit mode of the two architectures are almost compatible with each other, and FreeBSD/amd64 should support them both.

As of this writing, the following processors are supported:

• AMD Athlon64 (“Clawhammer”).

• AMD Opteron (“Sledgehammer”).

• Intel 64-bit Xeon (“Nocona”). This processor is fabricated on 90nm process technology, and operates with 2.80 to 3.60 GHz (FSB 800MHz) and Intel E7520/E7525/E7320 chipsets.

• Intel Pentium 4 Processor supporting Intel EM64T (“Prescott”). This is fabricated on 90nm process technology, uses FC-LGA775 package, and operates with 3.20F/3.40F/3.60F GHz and Intel 925X Express chipsets. The corresponding S-Spec numbers are SL7L9, SL7L8, SL7LA, SL7NZ, SL7PZ, and SL7PX. Note that processors marked as 5xx numbers do not support EM64T.

Intel EM64T is an extended version of IA-32 (x86) and different from Intel IA-64 (Itanium) architecture, which FreeBSD/ia64 supports. Some Intel's old documentation refers to Intel EM64T as “64-bit extension technology” or “IA-32e”.

The largest tested memory configuration to date is 8GB. SMP support has been recently completed and is reasonably robust.

In many respects, FreeBSD/amd64 is similar to FreeBSD/i386, in terms of drivers supported. There may be some issues with 64-bit cleanliness in some (particularly older) drivers. Generally, drivers that already function correctly on other 64-bit platforms should work.

FreeBSD/amd64 is a very young platform on FreeBSD. While the core FreeBSD kernel and base system components are generally fairly robust, there are likely to still be rough edges, particularly with third party packages.