Linus Torvalds wrote:

>There really is no good reason not to just call
>it x86-64. Anything else just tends to have obvious issues
>that make it impractical. Either it's stupid political
>issues with company names ("Intel 64"? Who the hell do
>they think they are kidding?), or it's just idiotic and
>clearly misleading (x64 - see the thread just here on why
>that name sucks).

I'm surprised to hear you say that, Linus, since I always quote you when I explain why "ex-eight-six-sixty-four" sucks as a name!

> 386BSD made the mistake of putting a lot of numbers and
> weird abbreviations into the name, and is scaring away a
> lot of people just because it sounds too technical.
(Linus Torvalds, sometime before 1994)

There will have to be a 64 bit transition on the user desktop over the next few years, and end-users will actually need to care about 64 bit mode (as in "can their system handle it"). Most end-users have forgotten about 386s and 486s, so "x86" makes no sense to them.

Of course, that doesn't mean that any of the other names that have been put forward are much better. x64, notwithstanding people's inability to see the x, is at least fairly simple.

Maybe something like "Delta" or "Sigma" would have been better...