Microsoft Commits to Using Opteron

the_1000th_Monkey writes "According these articles at The Inquirer, Infoworld, and The Register Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 will support AMD's 64-bit Opteron processor. Beta releases can be expected in the middle of this year. Here is MS's official press release."

Comments

Any Doubt?

[TheFlyingGoat]

Was there any doubt that this would happen? Since MS is running on about a 3-5 year Server cycle, the next server release would happen around 2008. I would assume that most high end servers and many workstations would have 64 bit processors by this time. It just makes sense that MS would support the 64 bit processor being released by the 2nd largest processor company.

Re:Any Doubt?

[rodgerd]

x86-64 is scarecly a hack, it's a pretty significant re-engineering effort that actually addresses many of the complaints about the ia32 architecture (like register starvation).

As for why WinXP doesn't play well on the Itanium - it's a hard problem. The ia64 architecture is completely new and is using a lot of concepts which are not well understood. It relies very, very heavily on compilers being tailored for it - there are still huge performance gaps between the various compilers claiming ia64 as a target (HP, for example, are still running 20-30% better than Intel's compiler).

Intel have screwed themselves here - their product is too radical a shift to make it easy for vendors to adapt.

Re:Tough choice for MS, I'm sure

[chrisseaton]

Change the record, grandad zealot!

Windows _has_ moved on since that.

Fragmentation for Windows 64-bit or Intel trouble?

[eyefish]

From a user's point of view, I wonder if in a couple of years users will have to decide if they want binaries for Intel's 64-bit architecture or AMD's. This as you all know is not a good thing, since it will bring market confussion to users (however, in the server space where these chips are first targeted this is not so big of an issue, specially with technologies like Java). A workaround is for companies to ship versions of their products for both architectures, thus at the very least this represents a burden on developers.

Another posibility I see is that AMD's choice of creating a backwards-compatible x86-64 instructions set will reign supreme over Intel's, and thus force Intel to adopt in AMD's x86-64.

Either way, I see turbulent times ahead...

Microsoft Misses Opteron Product Launch

[Master Bait]

Is like I see it. They're already losing out to Linux and BSD on the server side of things. Now they didn't even get their act together enough to have something for the Opteron launch.

By the time their crappy server OS does get launched, they will be facing an entrenched group of free OSs that have 100% market share.

Re:64 Bit-OS .... that's great, but ...

[zealot]

Your comments are misleading. The extra registers CAN improve performance when code is compiled to use them, but will not necessarily. AMD has previously quoted numbers that the expect to get about 15% additional performance with code that used the registers over code that does not. However, we do not know which apps they're using...

Also, I believe that interview you mention does talk about a 30% increase in performance, but it does NOT say it is from the registers (I can't find the link to the interview). It's not very clear what they were comparing to, but if I remeber correctly it looked like they were comparing to a regular Athon. Thus, the 30% increase would be coming from a) a new core with micro-architectural enhancements b) onboard memory controller c) extra registers.