Linked by John O'Sullivan on Fri 17th Oct 2003 17:48 UTC
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." Bill Gates, 1981. "64 bit is coming to desktops,there is no doubt about that, But apart from Photoshop, I can't think of desktop applications where you would need more than 4 gigabytes of physical memory, which is what you have to have in order to benefit from this technology." It seems to me that by the time it ships, Longhorn will need 4 gigs of RAM.
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XP 64bit for AMD64 (Windows XP 64-Bit Edition for 64-Bit Extended Systems) is already available on MSDN. I suspect it is kind of a hybrid between the IA64 version and the x86 version. It uses a modified wow64 layer for running 32bit apps. IA64 architecture uses EFI firmware wheras AMD64 uses the traditional bios and plug-n-play.
The NT kernel is written in mostly portable C code with the platform specific bits being kept in the hardware abstraction layer. The experiance of creating the IA64 version probably made making the AMD64 version a lot more straight forward.
The release should be sometime in the first half of next year.
In some ways its a shame the OS couldn't be ready at the same time as the chip was released. I can't imagine many OEMs want to ship 64bit systems without the OS support. Do they give you a voucher to upgrade to 64bit XP when it is released?
Won't it be nice to have the whole of Windows compiled for the newest processor rather than the lowest common denominator x86 version? (i586 at the moment I think)
The biggest problem initially will probably be driver support. I'm sure nVidia and ATI will be up to the task but how long will it be for Creative etc. and other smaller hardware vendors to create 64bit drivers. I don't expect my digital TV card to keep on working.