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Windows XP 64-Bit Customer Preview Program
MBCook writes "I just notice that Microsoft has a new Windows XP 64-Bit Customer Preview Program starting today (February 3rd). If you have a AMD Opteron or Athlon64, you can go to the download page to get your copy. It's a pre-release copy that will expire in 360 days (which probably means the final will be out by then). Now Intel just changed their 64-bit plans, and all of a sudden this appears. Speculate away!"
We don' need no stinkin' speculation, why this is as obvious as a cow on a haystack!
Seriously, just what grounds do you need for bringing charges of industrial manipulation of the market by the two largest players ? Ok, there's no evidence (yet!), but just how thin can you stretch credulity before SNAP! ?
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Intel and Microsoft may or may not have a business deal to promote Intel's 64-bit processors. Microsoft wouldn't do this for AMD, because splitting the processor targets would cost Microsoft money. Developing for two processors is more expensive than developing for one. There's no need to delve into anti-corporate mumbo-jumbo to explain this one. It's simple economics, and probably good business from Bill Gates' point of view.
--Guns don't kill people, abortion clinics kill people.
I speculate in a couple days Microsoft will deny this release exists, as they suddenly pull it to give their old cartel partner a chance to catch up and save face.
Consider this:
Microsoft has an evaluation operating system for the Yamhill before Intel actually ships. That doesn't just look like they've been playing patty-cake, but that Intel is running to keep up with AMD. How embarrassing. What's Moore's Law got to say about this? "Every 2 years Intel will get a little further behind where they need to be, by an ever increasing margin until operating systems exists for processors they haven't even designed yet."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
My guess is that the initial rev will, in fact, be slower on 64-bit. Microsofts compilers are new to 64-bitness, and a reasonable amount of memory bandwidth will be wasted on larger ints. On the other hand, in 64-bit mode on the Opteron, there are twice as many GPR's, so it could wind up being faster. My bets are still on slower largely due to immaturity of the platform.
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
Windows XP 64-Bit Edition is designed to address the most demanding needs of technical workstation users who require large amounts of memory
System Requirements:
PC with an AMD Athlon64 or Opteron processor
256MB RAM
Yeah, I know they're minimum requirements, but it's amusing to think that anyone who needed this OS would actually have to refer to them.
The coolest voice ever.
Micrososft is doing this to keep us distracted away from Linux until Longhorn comes out. Two years is a long time, so we can always expect bits and pieces of "neato" stuff in the meantime.
What?
It makes perfect sense, everyone knows about the Wintel relationship, that's why Microsoft hasn't made an operating system to run on an apple computer, and has also stopped the flow of any apps that help to do so *ala, virtual pc*, even though apple's hardware is far superior.
I think the move of Microsoft to put G5's in the Xbox2 will start to shift this although.. Microsoft as well as anyone knows they can't continue to be architecture dependent especially in this new world. AMD has quite a good 64 bit chip now, so does IBM (and from that, Apple). The beauty of killing the old 9x Kernel allows for this, as the NT kernel was designed originally to run on different kind of archetectures, even when the design of 9x was still going on.
Basically.. Microsoft is gearing itself to extend it's hold on computing before it's grip becomes too weak to even matter, no speculation required.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Microsoft Windows.
Available for download.
Free.
I know the install will self-destruct after 1 year - and they're probably doing this to prevent early AMD64 adopters from running FreeBSD / Linux. But still - it sure is nice of them to give something away for free for a change.
That I've had been doing 64 bit development since, what, 1997? And I'm not even a 'bleeding-edge' kinda' person. And just to top it off, I doubt this is anymore than (to be genereous) a beta release.
I already covered this on another thread of this story, but the primary advantage of AMD64 applications over IA32 is the increased number of registers that the AMD64 instruction set affords, 8 general purpose registers over the 4 provided by IA32. This can significantly improve performance as it reduces the chance code needs to hit cache or main memory in the event that 4 general purpose registers are not sufficient for the task at hand.
I don't read too much into this; Microsoft already told Intel that they (Intel) will in fact stay compatible with AMD because they will not be releasing three separate 64-bit editions of their operating systems (Itanium, x86-64, ???).
In this case, I think the monopoly is working for us in preventing Intel from fracturing the market, which I am quite sure they would love to do.
So in this respect, I think Microsoft is just having the usual Microsoft delays. One of the biggest is supporting Read vs ReadExecute memory pages on the x86-64 chips. A Lot of code, including microsoft code (ATL anyone?), breaks the standards and is having to be cleaned up to work.
In addition, Itanium lacked WMP, DirectX, and many other features that customers will NOT do without on Athlon64 systems, meaning even more development time.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Nope. int and long are still 32 bits, at least on MS platforms. long long is 64 bits. The only difference is with the pointers. Otherwise, you have to specifically request a 64-bit data size. This way, you can keep binary compatibility (struct layout) and avoid memory wastage for places where 64 bits aren't needed. But you get more address space, more registers, and faster 64-bit math (when needed).
I just saw some very simple CPU-bounded benchmarks that put the AMD64 2.0 GHz (on WinXP-64) at about 2X the dhrystones of a P4 2.0 GHz. Dhrystones are mostly meaningless, but they do show something.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
In ANY halfway modern architecture each fetch from memory pulls in a whole row of cache. Which is more than 8 bytes. The fact that more data needs to be moved for small operations to be completed is NOT a benefit.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Did "a company" also provide all the necessary updated tools for lithography, validation, packaging, layout, design, etc.? The wafer is one tiny ingredient in the whole overall process. No company, not even one as rich as Intel, can simply change over to an entirely new substrate just because one single component is improved.
It's a pre-release copy that will expire in 360 days (which probably means the final will be out by then).
Not necessarily, maybe not even likely, particularly for something as big as an XP release. Many's the time that Microsoft has slipped a release beyond such dates. And in many of those cases, an update or date extender patch appeared to cover the slippage (sometimes several such patches).
A Ferrari is designed to address the most demanding needs of car drivers who require high velocity.
But the "driver requirements" is just a drivers licence and a fat wallet. If your old grandmother would like to use it to crawl to the nearest shop at 20MPH, she can.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
And Intel had 64-bits long before AMD
Yup... And while an Itanium 2 currently goes for $1500, the Opteron 248 comes in at under $1000, with Athlon64 3400s going for $400.
Oh - and it makes Opteron look like my grandma when it comes to the real domain of 64-bit computing - science and engineering.
In theory, the Itanium-2 beats the Opteron, even at a much lower clockrate. In practice, the benchmarks I've seen (mostly just summaries of material from Spec) show at most a 50% difference on comparable hardware. And that, only on native 64b code. For the desktop market, where 32b will still exist as a significant portion of the available programs for at least another few years, the Opteron and Athlon64 suffer *no* performance hit on 32b code, while the Itanium line slows to a crawl.
Overall, I'd agree that the Itanium fills a particular niche fairly well. With an Intel-optimized Fortran compiler, I doubt anything else can even come close, clock-for-clock. For general-purpose computing, however, AMD has made tradeoffs that I strongly believe will pay off, and not just over the long-term. For desktop use, this seems like a no-brainer - Go with AMD.
Looks like the massive investment Big Blue made in their fab plant is going to be a wise and profitable one. Not only are they producing their own stellar chips, but they're producing for AMD, they just signed a huge deal to produce for Sony, and they're going to be supplying Microsoft.
My guess is that Intel is sweating.
No, no: what he meant was that sometimes (quite often, actually) one process or the whole desktop becomes unresponsive, even though almost no CPU time is being used, the hard drive isn't working, no network traffic should be occuring etc. You just have to assume that something is waiting for something, but there is absolutely no indication what it is.
I see such delays almost every day; mostly on Windows (XP and 2000), but occasionaly on Linux too.
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The last time I checked, NT is built on something called a "Hardware Abstraction Layer" that made it relatively painless to port NT from MIPS to x86 and then to PowerPC. (NT was designed on MIPS R4000 machines which themselves were completely designed internally by Microsoft. This effort was deemed necessary to keep the codebase free of x86-specific assumptions and optimizations since portability was a key NT goal.) The hardest part about getting your system to run on a new 64-bit platform is getting drivers to work; generally you need lots of support from hardware vendors to accomplish this feat. Getting the OS itself to compile is the easy part.
But I doubt seriously that Windows NT is "so optimized for the older 32bit platform." The kernel is clearly portable to other architectures, and was in fact developed FIRST on a non-x86 architecture with different properties (page size, Endian-ness, etc). This leads me to believe that it is emphatically not "optimized" specifically for 32-bit x86. If you have evidence otherwise, I would like to see it.
Much more mature? Perhaps you were unaware of Windows XP 64-bit Edition? Sure, it only runs on Itanium, but do you not honestly think that for Microsoft to have released it in early 2003 that they would probably have been working on it and testing it for at least a couple years prior to that? Also, from Microsoft's website, I notice that they have also implemented a 32-bit emulation layer for Itanium called "Windows On Windows 64" (WOW64) that lets the OS run 32-bit X86 code. Does Suse have this capability built-in?
The other issue which I pointed out earlier is the driver situation. You can't really call a product "much more mature" unless its drivers are more mature. I don't see a clear win either way at the moment.