Continuing Part I from last week, this is the Part II article regarding the future of 64-bit CPUs, called "Under the Microarchitectural Covers": "Who will dominate 64-bit computing, AMD or Intel? AMD's Hammer architecture is compelling and compatible, but IA-64 has great long-term potential. Will Intel also hedge its bet with a 64-bit x86 design?" "Instruction Dispatch and Execution": See how Hammer's nine execution units are nothing like Itanium's. "Seamless and Powerful Multiprocessing": Hammer's onboard memory controller and HyperTransport links--big advantage. "Intel's Ace in the Hole": What's this rumored 'Yamhill' 64-bit x86. On a related note, Intel's McKinley 64-bit CPU will showcase at next week's Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.

"BSD is now three times as popular on the desktop than Linux, Apple's Ernest Parbakar told attendees at the annual USENIX BSD Conference here yesterday. That's thanks to Mac OS X, of course, which is a BSD-based Unix (although much of this remains hidden). Read the rest of the story at TheRegister. Our Take: This is definetely true for the desktop where Linux holds less than 1% (and Apple a bit less than 3% according to Oct 2001 stats), but that is certainly not true for the server market, where Linux holds around 25%.

KDE 3, Beta 2 was released today after a short delay. There are packages for Linux and Tru64. The final release is scheduled early in the second quarter 2002, with one or more intervening "RC" releases preceding the final release. Just two weeks ago, Gnome 2 also had a second alpha release.

Visual Studio .NET is the comprehensive tool set for rapidly building and integrating XML Web services, Microsoft Windows based applications, and Web solutions. After four years of preparation and two years of marketing hype, ZDNews notes, Microsoft is releasing Visual Studio.Net--development tools crucial to its Web services plans. The tools bundle replaces the existing Visual Studio tools--used by some 5 million developers, according to Microsoft--and includes several new features, along with updates to existing products such as the company's popular Visual Basic and Visual C++ tools. Update: Get the scoop for Gates' keynote, plus more information, at C|Net News. Update 2: Somewhat related, ArsTechnica features an informative article, explaining as to what .NET really is.

Not directly operating system news, but nevertheless, interesting news for all us geeks. So, Carmack says that GeForce4-MX is not a good buy for Doom3: "Nvidia has really made a mess of the naming conventions here. I always thought it was bad enough that GF2 was just a speed bumped GF1, while GF3 had significant architectural improvements over GF2. I expected GF4 to be the speed bumped GF3, but calling the NV17 GF4-MX really sucks. GF4-MX will still run Doom properly, but it will be using the NV10 codepath with only two texture units and no vertex shaders. A GF3 or 8500 will be much better performers. The GF4-MX may still be the card of choice for many people depending on pricing, especially considering that many games won't use four textures and vertex programs, but damn, I wish they had named it something else."

"There are many distributions of BSD, the most popular of which are OpenBSD, and BSD/OS. Similar to Linux, BSD is based on open source code and widely used for Web hosting. Often compared to Linux, noncommercial BSD operating systems generally have more liberal open source licenses, 10 years' more history, and many BSD proponents credit these operating systems with greater reliability and efficiency than Linux. But while Linux garners all the industry attention and sales, BSD is hidden from the spotlight." Someone could argue that FreeBSD is the most popular BSD these days, but in any case, you can read the article at ZDNet.

Breadbox Computer Company, announced recently that they have signed a worldwide non-exclusive licensing agreement with Geoworks, to license the GEOS operating system for use on any and all hardware platforms and devices, including desktop computers, PDAs, smart phones, communicators, set-top boxes, and other embedded devices. Breadbox has been devoted to and particpated in most major GEOS projects for the past 10 years. In other operating system news, Roadrunner, a single-user, general-purpose operating system based on the POSIX standards just had a new release, while MenuetOS, the x86 assembly-only OS, had a release with support for more advanced multithreading. Last, but not least, the SkyOS folks let us know of their latest advancements on their OS, which it seems to be shaping up pretty good.

KernelTrap has spoken with Linux kernel hacker, Andrew Morton. His contributions cover a wide range of kernel components, including ext3 on the 2.4 kernel and the low-latency patch.

Those of you who had been following my articles at BeNews last year, you probably remember the France-based RealTech-VR and their effort to bring a Direct3D-to-OpenGL wrapper to the BeOS. The company paused most of that effort when was clear that BeOS was stopped being developed, but after pressure from the community, they have now open sourced their D3D-2-GL implementation and work has already started to port the wrapper to MacOS and Linux in an effort to bring Direct 3D to more alternative operating systems. Today we feature a mini-interview with Stephane Denis of RealTech-VR about the implementation.

Yet another excerpt (previous articles here and here) from the well known "Modern Operating Systems" book at InformIT (free registration required): "When a page fault occurs, the operating system has to choose a page to remove from memory to make room for the page that has to be brought in. This sample chapter from Modern Operating Systems looks at a variety of page replacement algorithms designed to tackle this problem." InformIT also features two more excerpts this week: "Multithreading and the C++ Type System" from the "Modern C++ Design" book and "Solaris: Cluster and Complex Design Issues" from the "Designing Solutions with Sun Cluster 3.0" book.

"Operating systems will become highly distributed and self-healing and will collaborate with applications. Imagine computers in a group providing disk storage for their users, transparently swapping files and optimizing their collective performance, all with no central administration. But the machines providing this pool of virtual storage dare not trust one another completely. Indeed, a hacker takes over one of them and ruthlessly begins attacking others in the group." Read the rest of the story at ComputerWorld.

Gobe Software recently announced the release of version 3.0.3 of gobeProductive, a free update for all 3.0.x versions. If you are a user of gobeProductive, you may upgrade by selecting "Check for Updates" from the 'Help' menu within gobeProductive. gobeProductive 3 is a great office suite for Windows and Gobe is so generous that is giving away 10 copies to 10 lucky OSNews readers, one copy every day for the next 10 business days! Total value of $1250 USD. Enter the competition now, read more how you can win.

After more than a week of coding, the updated OSNews design is pretty much done. While a lot of you (including myself) prefered the older, simpler & cleaner design, which was also much faster to load and even rendered nicely on... text-based browsers, this updated design was necessary. We had to expand PriceGrabber (part of the deal) so we can get some revenue to be able to pay for our (always on-the-increase) bandwidth needs, and the only way to do so was to add a vertical bar. Also, we needed to add more menu items (check out the massively updated "OS Resources" and "Advertise" pages), so we had to make the menu vertical (the 765-pixel wide horizontal menu was not a scalable option anymore). UPDATE: I just added better support for Lynx, Links & W3M text-based browsers. *You will have* to load www.osnews.com/home.php instead of the plain www.osnews.com though because the default index.php is actually static (generated on-the-fly every 1 minute) so it won't work with my PHP text browser detection code. UPDATE 2: Better AvantGo support added.

"This will end up being one of the world's worst investments, I'm afraid," - David House, former Intel chief of corporate strategy said in the early 1990s. I've been fasinated by microprocessors for years and have been following the Merced debacle since back in 1994 when HP and Intel announced they were getting together to make some amazing new technology.