I could only get to page three before being thoroughly disgusted by the lack of knowledge of the writer. How can he be writing books, without actually knowing the material?
The Prescott introduced 64-bit to the Intel world, not the Core 2. Kind of common knowledge. The Athlon XP had a 36-bit address bus? I don't remember ever seeing that.
Then we go to the misinformation about the 8086/8088 to 386.
In actuality, there were four modes in the 80386. Real, Virtual 86, Protected 286, and Protected 386. Yup, four. And no, Windows 3.0 was not expected to run on an 8088 or 80286, because it DID use Virtual 86, which those processors could not support. You know, the part where they let you go from one DOS task to another. That was in the hardware. And that hardware started with the 80386.
Moreover, the 80286 did NOT have the same instruction set as the 8086. Only in real mode did it. And why do you suppose it was called real mode? Maybe because the addresses were not virtualized? The 80286, as mentioned above, did have virtual addresses in what was called the 80286 Protected Mode. It not only ran Real Mode apps much faster, but when in Protected Mode was very capable of running multitasking Operating Systems, something that could not be done well on the 8086. It also increased the memory bus to 24-bits, albeit still using 64K bit segments.
OS/2 1.x was the best example of an OS using 286 Protected mode, although any software using "Extended Memory" was taking advantage of the greater addressing of the 286, albeit in an inelegant way.
I stopped reading after page three, as it's just discouraging to think people are writing books without being accurate. OK, so we have the author that got it wrong, fair enough, but what about the people who are supposed to error check it. I certainly don't know everything, and I know this stuff, and it's pretty basic. No one caught this? Are you kidding me? The 286 stuff might be a bit far away, but not knowing that x86-64 first appeared in the Prescott line is really difficult to understand, and is very basic. This is made more so because of all the rumors that the processor was made to support it, but Intel was hiding it so as to not undercut the Itanium. In time, it was proven true.
Please, don't spread misinformation. Someone will repeat this stuff, and then someone else will, and it becomes 'fact' despite being wrong. If you publish a book, make a friggin effort! I'm sure I could errors the rest of the way, but it's just too annoying for me to wade through this rubbish.
By the way, the term CPU bus is an ambiguous one. The CPU has multiple buses, and if you used that term with me, I'd wonder which one you were referring to. Find a more accurate term, like PCI-E bus if that's what you are trying to say.