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Microsoft Commits to Using Opteron

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the catching-up-to-linux dept.

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."

1 of 390 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Any Doubt? by rodgerd · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.