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!"

Comments

"I just notice"?

[Chuck Bucket]

"I just notice" that this post wasn't proofed before it was posted.

CB

Actual Performance Difference

[neomage86]

I wonder if a 64 bit OS will make any performance difference for the average desktop user. Since its not like any normal people have more than a gig of ram anyways. Is it possible that it could even slow down 32 bit apps?

Re:Actual Performance Difference

[Paladin128]

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.

Re:Actual Performance Difference

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

There were linux benchmarks which made /. recently, comparing the speed of 32-bit code and 64-bit code on the Opteron. 32-bit code ran measurably faster.

Re:Actual Performance Difference

[Neon Spiral Injector]

Microsoft has had a 64-bit version of NT since almost the start. Also sizeof (int) == 4 on AMD64, same as IA32. Just the pointers are larger.

Re:Actual Performance Difference

[cubicledrone]

I wonder if a 64 bit OS will make any performance difference for the average desktop user.

Of course! We need an operating system that will support a pointer to all the RAM on the planet.

Re:Actual Performance Difference

[Tim C]

I don't remember Linux ones, but there were some for Solaris a couple of weeks ago. The benchmarks themselves were pretty widely slated here, though.

Re:Actual Performance Difference

[BeerMilkshake]

In a 32-bit machine, each fetch from memory retrieves 4 bytes. Even if you only use one, the other three are cached. So, when reading sequentially, you get four bytes for the price of one.

In a 64-bit machine, each fetch returns 8 bytes, so you 8 for the price of one.

Re:Actual Performance Difference

[ikewillis]

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.

Re:Actual Performance Difference

[cookd]

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.

Re:Actual Performance Difference

[Tester]

That's bizzare, the benchmarks that we did before porting Gentoo showed that the Opterons were actually faster in 64bit mode than in 32bit.. I attribute this to the presence of twice as many generic registers..

Re:Actual Performance Difference

[Zeinfeld]

I wonder if a 64 bit OS will make any performance difference for the average desktop user. Since its not like any normal people have more than a gig of ram anyways. Is it possible that it could even slow down 32 bit apps?

Its been a long time since I had performance issues due to CPU bottlenecks. My twin processor 650MHz box works just as fast as my 2.4GHz single processor box in practice.

The big issue for me are the cases where the stupid machine just locks up and does fuck all for 20 seconds or so. CPU meter shows 3% utilization, no disk activity. What is the stupid thing doing?

Same goes for UNIX systems, its not the processing thats the issues, or even the legitimate I/O delays, its the cretinous delays built into broken device drivers and applications.

I would like Windows to have a meter built in that would show which processes were waiting and the resources they were waiting on.

My other pet peeve is what the cretins at Checkpoint think is an acceptable VPN client. Every time the credentials time out a box appears for me to re-enter my credentials. Only I use cert based credentials stored in CAPI so all I am doing is hitting OK. Even so the box locks the user interface for about 90 seconds while it does something. Oh @$#(& it did it again.

Re:Actual Performance Difference

[Cuthalion]

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.

Re:Actual Performance Difference

[Anonymous Coward]

Go their benchmarks aslo show a marked improvement for Linux on 64bit.

Some tests scored about as much as a 20% improvement in performance, athough it's more realistic to expect a 8-10% average improvement across the board.

Of course windows likely will run slower since it's so optimized for the older 32bit platform.

Linux is just a much more mature platform for 64bit computers. I mean we've had Suse 64bit (aviable for free from Suse's ftp install stuff) for almost a year now.

Re:Actual Performance Difference

[myg]

Actually, there are a few tasks that benefit from 64-bit code: Encryption, Databases, and file-systems. Most modern filesystems allow files >4GB and with digital video the norm now files much larger than 4GB are common.

So the processor spends less clock ticks doing 64-bit arithmatic for file offsets. Cryptography can benefit too. In particular the DH key agreement protocol and RSA public-private key cipher both require the use of "big numbers" (as in 1024 bits and up). And doing these operations 64-bits at a time rather than 32-bits can result in a performance impact. SSL session negotiation may be improved significantly, so that could be a boon to SSL webservers (not that IIS makes a great webserver).

Databases also need 64-bit numbers. Even low-end databases frequently have ID numbers that are 64-bits. For large databases the ability to compute page offsets (which are typically 64-bits) more efficiently can help.

And perhaps a subtle improvement may be in the handling of bitmaps. For example doing a bitwise operation 64-bits at a time will process more pixels than a 32-bit operation in the same amount of time.

But all of those things are really just noise for the special case of amd64. The x86 has always been a register-starved architecture. Going to 64-bit mode gives you 8 more general purpose registers. That alone may very well counter any of the performance loss due to 64-bit integers.

Lots of people on Slashdot have said 64-bit code is slower but haven't pointed out why. Probably the most important thing is cache coherency. 64-bit data structures are (surprise) larger than their 32-bit counterparts. That means that the effective rate of the cache is reduced. As an added bummer, address translation on 64-bit values is slower when there are more levels of translation.

Re:Actual Performance Difference

[Miguelito]

Well I did some benchmarks using openssl's built in speed tests, and running in 64 bit vs 32 bit made a HUGE difference. Of course that was running a 64bit openssl as well. The opterons I have access to even beat the Itanium2s I have access to at work. By a lot in the smaller bit key sizes, but still either tied or beat the ia64 in the larger key sizes.

Here are the charts I made in OpenOffice on the data I collected. Even a 2GHz opteron beat a 3.2Ghz Xeon in 32 bit mode. :)

Of course this was just a benchmark, but it does show that things that use openssl would benefit from running under 64bit on an opteron.

Re:Actual Performance Difference

[Soko]

NT for Alpha had no long pointers and the same 4GB memory limit etc. as its IA32 counterpart. The processor was certainly 64 bits, but the OS was 32 bits at it's core. IIRC there were some places where they had to use 64 in order to get the thing to load, but not where it counted.

If Microsoft had actually used the Alpha to it's fullest potential, all of my servers would likely be runnning 21464s, not Xeons.

Yes, I'm still mad at DEC/Compaq/HP for squandering the Alpha tech. *grumble*

Soko

Re:Actual Performance Difference

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

C/C++ standard only guarantees sizeof(long) >= sizeof(int) >= sizeof(short). MS had this issue going from MSVC 1.5 (a 16 bit compiler, sizeof(int) == 2) to MSVC 4 (32 bit compiler, sizeof(int) == 4).

Java defines sizes. sizeof(int) == 4, and always will.

Re:Actual Performance Difference

[benzapp]

Actually, there are a few tasks that benefit from 64-bit code: Encryption, Databases, and file-systems.

Don't forget media encoding.

Ripping that DVD will be a LOT faster with a 64-bit optimized encoder.

Re:Actual Performance Difference

[jkovach]

It depends on what you're doing. I recently gave myself a 1.8 GHz Opteron system for Christmas and have been running some performance tests comparing 32 and 64 bit versions of the same applications.

Using LAME compiled from source with the default compiler options and "--alt-preset standard" encoding settings, it took 4m20s to encode an 11 minute MP3 with the 32 bit version and 2m51s to encode using the 64 bit version - about 30% faster. However, comparing some of the filters in a 64 bit GIMP 1.3.23 compiled from source with default settings to the GIMP 1.3.23 from the Debian distribution was quite different - running the "Diffraction Patterns" filter with default options on a 512x512 image took 11 seconds with the 32 bit version and 16 seconds with the 64 bit version - about 50% slower!

Of the other tests I ran, MP3 decoding with mpg123, bzip2 compression and AES encryption with OpenSSL were faster in 64 bit mode, and 3DES encryption with OpenSSL was faster in 32 bit mode. Of course, one of the advantages of having a hybrid 32/64 bit processor is that you can run whichever version is faster for a given task, onlike on the Itanium which until recently had only software emulation for 32 bit code.

I have also heard that 64 bit Windows on Opteron is slower at running 32 bit code than 32 bit Windows on Opteron, which has made me want to rerun my 32 bit tests under a 32 bit kernel. I also want to run the same tests on a Mac G5 and a Pentium 4 for comparison. Some other time...

Re:Actual Performance Difference

[vrt3]

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.

Re:Actual Performance Difference

[Paul Crowley]

Bignum math would benefit enormously, but it's an atypical application...

Re:Actual Performance Difference

[Zeinfeld]

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.

Yep, that is it. I know how to use perfmon, I can recognize an explorer crash. But sometimes the thing just goes off to sleep.

I noticed a similar issue with dotNET, it can take an awful long time to parse XML and while it is busy it can be stuck at 22% utilization on a 2 proc machine.

Outlook is also good at doing this when you make the mistake of using MAPI connect mode. The idiots at MSFT used RPC. The program can hang for an hour synchronizing.

This is all stupid programming, not all in the O/S. I want the O/S to point the finger at the programmer responsible. I want his picture on a Web site.

Speculation ?

[Space cowboy]

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

Re:Speculation ?

[fnord123]

I don't get your logic.

If MS & Intel where in league, wouldn't MS not release this until Intel had an x86-64 chip out?

Intel will have to follow AMD

[Random BedHead Ed]

At this point there's enough Opteron stuff out there that Intel can't avoid implementing an architecture compatible with amd64. Yes, I think the timing is probably not a coincidence. Though I'm sure Microsoft wasn't waiting for Intel, they probably informed Groves and Co. of the release in advance.

If Intel can't stay compatible with AMD's lineup they could end up behind. That would certainly be a first for Intel.

Re:Intel will have to follow AMD

[Slack3r78]

That would certainly be a first for Intel.

Not really, it'd just be reverting back to where things were about 4 years ago. AMD was the first to break 1GHz, remember? It wasn't until later with the introduction of SSE2 (which the Athlons lack) and AMD hitting a brick wall with ramping up the clockspeed on the Athlons that Intel regained the overall performance lead. When it comes to price/performance, Intel has always lagged behind.

Re:Intel will have to follow AMD

[dellis78741]

The thing that annoys me the most is that Intel has guessed wrong badly twice in trying to drive the market deeper into their corner(RAMBUS, Itanium) and AMD has guessed right both times (DDR, X86-64) and all the time Intel cranks out a profit every quarter and AMD come's up for air for a couple of quarters every other year. If Intel were going against an equal-sized adversary they'd be chapter 11 some years ago for making such mistakes.

Simple

[Tenfish]

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.

Re:Simple

[diamondsw]

Looks like someone needs to double-check that with Bill, then:

"Important: Windows XP 64-Bit Edition for 64-Bit Extended Systems is only compatible with 64-bit AMD Opteron- or Athlon 64-based computers. It cannot be successfully installed on 64-bit Intel Itanium-based systems."

I don't see any mention of an upcoming Intel it will run on, either.

Re:Simple

[cubicledrone]

64-Bit Edition for 64-Bit Extended Systems is only compatible with 64-bit

You will need 64-bit RAM and a 64-bit CPU and the latest versions of Disk64, Monitor64 and Soundcard64 with the extra-fast super-amazing 8064-bit VIDEOZAP ULTRA MEGA ZING FLAPPA ULTREON WOW VIDEO card.

"Then can I write this 27-line spreadsheet?"

Speculation...

[ackthpt]

Now Intel just changed their 64-bit plans, and all of a sudden this appears. Speculate away!"

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."

Thank you!

[Call Me Black Cloud]

I appreciate the link to Microsoft's website. I've been looking all over for that thing and haven't had any luck finding it. You've saved me from a lot more time spent searching, my friend.

Re:Thank you!

[higgins]

I was very confused and kept going to this Mike Rowe guy's site instead. I tell ya. There oughta be a law.

I've been using it for a while.

[Sheetrock]

Very crisp. Despite the double memory/instruction access time created by accessing words twice the size of the 32-bit chips, I think they're using the new chaining instruction set to double or triple most of their refresh operations. And it's still got Solitare.

Re:I've been using it for a while.

[petabyte]

And it's still got Solitare.

Ooooh, I never thought of that! Anyone have the benchmarks on how much faster solitare is in 64-bit? :)

Windows Media Player?

[ikewillis]

Will the AMD64 build include Windows Media Player? It was left out of the IA64 version due to what I can only assume are 64-bit cleanliness issues with the DirectShow API and WMP code. I can only assume that an AMD64 build would allow 32-bit builds of DirectShow and WMP which execute through the WoW abstraction layer.

Re:Windows Media Player?

[OrenWolf]

You don't need to abstract it.

That's the point. The chip can execute 32 bit code natively. All you need are appropriate 32-bit libraries (DLL's in windowsspeak).

That's how Linux does it. want a 32 bit app? Install the 32 bit glibc and you're good to go.

Statically compiled apps need *nothing*.

Re:Windows Media Player?

[ikewillis]

Evidently you haven't heard about the Windows-on-Windows (WoW) subsystem utilized on AMD64 processors:

"The Microsoft(R) WOW64 (Windows(R) on Windows) subsystem will allow most 32-bit applications to launch seamlessly on 64-bit Windows," said Brian Marr, Windows product manager. "WOW64 is designed to provide interoperability and great performance on AMD64 processors across the 32/64-bit boundaries. As customers migrate to 64-bit Windows XP and Windows Server, they will have a code base that will support both 32- and 64-bit applications."

While it's wonderful Linux understands multiple ABIs natively, Windows does not, and utilizes WoW to seamlessly launch 32-bit applications on 64-bit builds of Windows.

Re:Windows Media Player?

[Deagol]

How far down will XP-64 thunk, anyway? Are the 16-bit and 32-bit layers at the same level? Or does 16-bit sit on top of 32-bit? So a 16-bit Windows app will be thunked through 2 layers now?

(Sorry -- I just had to make this post. I remember when all the rags had countless articles on "thunking" when Win95 came out. Will we have the same when the first mass-market 64-bit OS hit the streets? Not that I know of any good PC rags these days -- suggestions?)

Re:Windows Media Player?

[daina]

Yes, Build 1069 of Windows XP 64-bit includes Media player. It is a common misconception that Media Player was left out of the OS, but it is untrue.

I have been running 1069 for several weeks, and Media Player has been working fine with two exceptions: it has no support for DVDs and I have had some trouble installing nonstandard codecs. I am not sure why.

Build 1069 also includes a 64-bit build of IE, which is noticeably very much faster at drawing and reflowing complicated pages as compared with the 32-bit version on the same machine under old Windows XP.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to find a single benchmark compiled for AMD64 in order to do further speed testing, nor in fact any other AMD64 applications for real-world type comparisons. Apparently Sisoft Sandra has been released for AMD64, but I cannot find it.

Expanding zip archives with WinRAR is so fast on my AMD 3200+ system with 1GB DDR400 and MSI MB that, at first, I sat there waiting for something to happen, not realizing the operation had completed without raising an hourglass. I suspect that this may be a chip architecture effect, rather than a speed advantage of XP64, however, since it seems fast under XP32 and my version of WinRAR is certainly not complied for AMD64.

The only real problem is drivers. I managed to get a Promise SATA driver running well in SATA (rather than RAID) mode by downloading the very latest drivers from Promise.

System requirements

[Faust7]

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.

Re:System requirements

[PaulK]

From the xp_amd64.txt file on the downloaded iso:

512 megabytes (MB) of RAM (minimum)

I'm sure that Microsoft would never deliberately mislead anyone, so this must be a simple error on their website or in their release documentation.

There's a first time for everything. :)

Why 64 on Desktops

[tymbow]

We'll probaly have to wait for the next "killer app" (god I hate that phrase) before it becomes mainstream for desktop users. I can't see a need for it on the desktop just yet. Big database clusters on the other hand...

How's this for speculation

[iminplaya]

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.

no need to speculate

[ciroknight]

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.

Re:no need to speculate

[swissmonkey]

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.

VirtualPC for Mac can be purchased separately and will come bundled with Office.

Check your facts

Re:no need to speculate

[ProtonMotiveForce]

Oh come on, I though you people had special Troll recognition. I've seen subtler trolls under the bridge leading to my house - they always sneak up on me and mutter stuff about eating my bones.

This guy is 100% troll and it's 110% obvious.

Microsoft Sold Me an OS!

[tonyr60]

I went to the site and odered a copy of the CD. First Microsoft OS I have bought for many years, but for $US7.95 (including international delivery) the price is quite reasonable and comparable to the competition.

Re:Microsoft Sold Me an OS!

[skinny.net]

$7.95?! That can't be right! Here in the US, 64 bits is $8.

Re:Microsoft Sold Me an OS!

[pboulang]

Ok, now how many of you just did the math to make sure that statement was correct in hopes of correcting it? Shame on you.

It's an OLD version

[Ledfoot]

It's build 1069. That's the build they gave us back at the AMD Athlon 64 release event back in September. There are newer builds that are supposed to be better (there's a guy on AMDZone.com that has 1169)...

Basically, if you want to mess with this, go ahead, but there's a LOT of stuff missing and good luck getting drivers for any of your hardware!

Intel is not impressing me these days

[AviLazar]

I still recall reading the article in Wired magazine a few months back. A company approached them with an offer to provide them perfect diamond wafers (produced at less then $5/wafer) and Intel did not take the offer because they have not gotten their full investment back on the silicon. So given that they refused to have an easy method of increasing their processor spead by a very big number, it is not surprising that they still haven't gotten 64 bit over AMD... Shame, Intel used to be the best. -A

Re:Intel is not impressing me these days

[fnord123]

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.

Re:Intel is not impressing me these days

[HardCase]

I still recall reading the article in Wired magazine a few months back. A company approached them with an offer to provide them perfect diamond wafers (produced at less then $5/wafer) and Intel did not take the offer because they have not gotten their full investment back on the silicon. So given that they refused to have an easy method of increasing their processor spead by a very big number, it is not surprising that they still haven't gotten 64 bit over AMD

Yeah, dude, I remember hearing on Art Bell's show about this guy who made a carburator that could get something like 100 miles per gallon in a Lincoln Continental. He took it to all the big auto manufacturers, but they were so tied up with the big oil companies that they turned him down. He threatened to take it to the Japanese car makers and HE DISAPPEARED! It's like the cold fusion technology that the government got from aliens that they're keeping at Area 51...if they let it out, then the oil companies will go out of business. Since the oil companies contribute so much to the politicians, the politicians aren't going to give out that technology. SO WE'RE STILL DEPENDENT ON OIL!!!

Man, I hear you. I'll bet that Intel has some kind of connection to the silicon industry and they're just keeping us tied to slow chips so that the silicon wafer makers won't go out of business. It's all a conspiracy. I'm so glad that Art Bell is back. I really miss Miss Cleo, too.

~h~

Re:Intel is not impressing me these days

[pla]

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.

with 64 bits...

[vpscolo]

I suppose it means windows will take 1/2 the time to crash and at least twice as long to write out dump files

Rus

Free? Which kind of free?

[Call Me Black Cloud]

Damn, I never get it straight. Is this software free as in speech or free as in beer? Since the software is only good for about a year, I'd guess this is free as in beer, because my beer has an expiration date too. But does that mean Linux is free as in speech because it doesn't have an expiry? Of course some really skunky beers don't either. Now, can you have free as in beer in a cathedral? All the cathedrals I've been too serve wine. So is this free Windows free as in wine?

See, it's this kind of thing that is holding up the adoption of Linux. It's too confusing.

I guess...

[Cytlid]

...the submitter didn't RTFA!

Important: Windows XP 64-Bit Edition for 64-Bit Extended Systems is only compatible with 64-bit AMD Opteron- or Athlon 64-based computers. It cannot be successfully installed on 64-bit Intel Itanium-based systems.

I don't read too much into this

[rabtech]

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.

sizeof on modern OSes

[Anonymous Coward]

char is 8-bit, nearly by definition
short is 16-bit
int is 32-bit (DOS and Xenix are not modern)
long is 32-bit on all Windows OSes
long is the same size as a pointer Linux, BSD, Mac
void* is the natural size for the machine
long long is 64-bit

So 32-bit Windows and 32-bit UNIX have the
same sizes a each other. 64-bit systems differ,
because Windows sets sizeof(long)==4 and a
UNIX system sets sizeof(long)==sizeof(void*).

Terrible...

[Stupid Dog]

After installing this release on my MSI K8T-Neo Board, I have no drivers for scanner, printer (LPT1 unsupported...), ISDN PCI Card, Wireless LAN card and many other things.

I spent nights searching and begging for drivers. Thank you Microsoft for bringing this truly Linux user feeling to the Windows platform.

Official benchmarks here

[hobuddy]

You can see official AMD benchmark results of various programs running on Windows XP 32-bit edition vs. Windows XP 64-bit edition beginning on page 36 of this PDF. The results have three columns: time in seconds on WinXP 32-bit w/ 32-bit executable, time in seconds on WinXP 64-bit with 32-bit executable, and time in seconds on WinXP 64-bit with 64-bit executable.

Well, on Windows

[Kjella]

The big issue for me are the cases where the stupid machine just locks up and does fuck all for 20 seconds or so. CPU meter shows 3% utilization, no disk activity. What is the stupid thing doing?

Same goes for UNIX systems, its not the processing thats the issues, or even the legitimate I/O delays, its the cretinous delays built into broken device drivers and applications.

On Windows, the process locking up everything here most often seems to be explorer.exe. I've found that going into task manager, killing and running it from there (since you just lost your start menu with the run command) will restore the machine to normal.

Using that little trick every time it starts acting stupid, my windows box is running quite nicely for weeks. Doing it doesn't interrupt any of the applications or services running, the kernel is handling that just fine. Quite silly really.

Kjella

Re:Well, on Windows

[DexterX]

On Win2K and higher, you can split out the file system browsing from the desktop instance of Explorer.exe. Run Explorer and select Tools->Folder Options->View->"Launch folder windows in a separate process". It uses a little more memory but prevents a slow device from slowing down the rest of the GUI.

You're right, though; Explorer blocks waiting for I/O way more often than it ought to. Most of the multithreading in GUIs is pretty good on Windows, so I'm not sure why Explorer tends to block on floppy I/O, network I/O, etc. Fortunately, it usually doesn't affect other running apps.

+5 Funny

[Kizzle]

Bla bla beowulf bla bla.

Don't hold your breath after 360 days

[Flexagon]

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).

Well, doh...

[Kjella]

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

sizeof (long long) == 8...

[Ayanami Rei]

and the Opteron can hold it one register. Just prefix the instruction with the OTHER size prefix byte. (for those who don't already know, most intel instructions if operating on a 16-bit short require a prefix byte. On the Opteron, you use a different prefix to get 64-bit ints and the extended regs)

There are plenty of places where it makes sense to use 64-bit regs, especially in the kernel when involving counters, timers, GIDs, and such.

I got only one thing to say to you...

[Kjella]

...the only thing worse than a masochist is a complaining masochist. You volunteered.

Kjella

Windows Server 2003 Also Available for Free

[xTK-421x]

Here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/64bit/e xtended/trial/default.mspx

Beta of course.

64 bit lies

[bl8n8r]

Finally, we'll be able to have an integer big enough to count the number of lies SCO has told so far.

Don't forget IBM in this race.

[kid zeus]

Not only is the G5 a beaut, but the upcoming fabrications, expecte to hit .65 by next year, are supposedly dazzling. With massive heat/energy savings over Intel's competition. Not to mention the predictive gushing over the subsequent G6s, G7s, etc. (yeah, yeah, I know... believe it when it's in front of me).

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.

AMD64 Laptops

[NLG]

A friend and I were in Best Buy today and I gave the new AMD64 equipped emachines laptop the once over. Very nice, I nearly drooled. It was tagged at $1599, with some rebates knocking off 150 or 200(don't recall which). Seemed nice. But... comes with WinXP Home(if I have to have Win, let it be Pro). When some non-beta 64bit OS's are out I can see getting one of these to play with...also, the battery life on these things is only about 1 hour 20 minutes. Jeez, I can't even watch a dvd with that!...not that I would set it on my lap. When I first walked up to it I lifted the front up a bit and slid my hand along the bottom(get your mind out of the gutter!). It was very hot to the left of center. Much hotter than an idle laptop should ever be. AMD really needs to work on the power consumption and heat issues before I will shell out a grand plus for this tech, especially with no final stable 64bit OS here yet. Yeah, don't bother telling me "XYZ Linux distro is 64 ready.", 'cuz it ain't. Wait til June/July. That is about when some decent stable OS's should be available.

"we will need MORE than 4 gigs of ram"

[rs79]

> "we will need MORE than 4 gigs of ram"

Absolutely. Just to be able to run a mail program.

Bloat on, you slacking fucks!

Windows XP 64-bit close to release?

[MtViewGuy]

I personally think that Windows XP Home/Professional for the AMD x86-64 CPU architecture is closer to release than people think.

They're probably right now redoing much of the OS code so it does take full advantage of x86-64 registers, and is waiting for other Microsoft departments to complete their work so an improved version of Internet Explorer 6.01 (Service Pack 2?) and all the Windows XP Service Pack 2 improvements are incorporated into the final version. Don't be surprised that when Windows XP SP2 ships some time this summer we'll see both 32-bit and the x86-64 64-bit version come out at the same time.

64-bit Windows

[kylef]

Of course windows likely will run slower since it's so optimized for the older 32bit platform.

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.

Linux is just a much more mature platform for 64bit computers.

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.

Re:64-bit Windows

[joib]

> Linux is just a much more mature platform for 64bit computers.

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?



Linux was ported to the alpha about a decade ago (this was still a 32-bit kernel, just like NT on alpha AFAIK), sometime in 1996 a real 64-bit version was released (2.0). Despite MS market share, I'd guess that there are a lot more 64-bit linux installations around than 64-bit windows.

Another important things is that since most linux software is open source and designed for portability from the start, a 64-bit kernel with a 64-bit userspace is as easy as a recompile (well, almost). MS has a big disadvantage here, because they need to wait for their ISV:s to produce 64-bit programs as well as drivers.

Re:64-bit Windows

[kylef]

Despite MS market share, I'd guess that there are a lot more 64-bit linux installations around than 64-bit windows.

You might be correct, but honestly both of us are just speculating. To be honest, I think neither Linux nor Windows can match the number of Solaris 64-bit installations there are in the world. But again, it would be interesting to see some data on the matter. My point was only that one can't call Linux "a much more mature platform," as the previous poster did.

I do know that HP and one or two others are shipping Itanium2 servers full-steam at the moment, despite Intel's recent 64-bit malaise. It's almost a given that all of those will be running 64-bit Windows. I've seen a demo of a HP 64-bit workstation running 64-bit Windows, and it was really nice. It even had accelerated video drivers, but I don't know what video hardware.

MS has a big disadvantage here, because they need to wait for their ISV's to produce 64-bit programs as well as drivers.

This is absolutely correct. If you have source code, you can (usually) just recompile for 64-bit user-mode applications. Otherwise you wait for an ISV to produce a binary for you. But Linux64 is in the same boat with Windows64 as far as drivers go. Arguably worse, since manufacturers have been (until now) unwilling to make their drivers open source and generally produce Linux drivers only after Windows drivers are already complete. And as we all know, the KEY to PC users' hearts is seamless hardware support!

Re:64-bit Windows

[Xabraxas]

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

I guess the last time you checked was a long time ago. Originally NT was built on top of a microkernel, and that is what was supposed to make it portable. Unfortunately it was dog slow and it is no longer a real microkernel. The microkernel is what you are referring to when you say "Hardware Abstraction Layer". It's safe to say that Windows was pretty much x86-centric until this release.

Re:64-bit Windows

[Bert64]

Windows NT has always been a 32bit platform however, even the version for the alpha processor used hacks to make the processor appear to be a 32bit one, the alpha, like the itanium, is a 64bit design from the ground up and has no 32bit compatibility mode atall, however it can emulate 32bit x86 and 32bit vax in software.
Linux on amd64 doesn`t need to emulate 32bit x86, since the amd64 architecture can execute 32bit x86 code natively. However alpha linux can emulate 32bit x86 code with a tool called em86
Aside from that, the grandparent poster is correct, linux is far more mature as a 64bit platform... linux has been 64bit on the alpha for years, ultrasparc too but not quite so long, and i believe there are 64bit mips and ppc ports too.

Re:64-bit Windows

[Bert64]

What`s more, 64bit windows is something new, so your far more likely to encounter non 64bit clean code in windows apps, Contrast this to unix apps.. where 64bit systems have been available for years and so a majority of programs can already compile cleanly on a 64bit platform.

Re:64-bit Windows

[Bert64]

However a lot of linux drivers are 64bit clean, and have long worked on 64bit Alpha, PPC and Sparc machines running Linux.. Many PCI nic and scsidrivers for instance work flawlessly across different architectures including 64bit ones.
I myself have an Alphastation with a number of pci cards using drivers intended for 32bit x86 machines, which work perfectly well.

Some notes and thoughts...

[89cents]

1. Nice to see an AMD64 directory on the CD instead of the old I386. There still is an I386.

2. EXE files seem to still start with the MZ initials and contain the text "This program cannot be run in DOS mode."???

3. Click on a .exe file on a P4 produces filename.exe is not a valid Win32 application - expected

4. Docs/XP_AMD64.TXT, system requirements contains:

* 1.5 Ghz Opteron(TM) or Athlon(TM) processor

* 512 megabytes (MB) of RAM (minimum)

See how many people try to install on their 32 bit
Athlon. Suprised to see 512MB minimum.

5. Suprised to see this bit about the relatively new .NET framework:

Applications dependent on Microsoft .NET Framework version 1.1 are not
compatible with Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition;
Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition; or Windows XP 64-Bit Edition
releases for AMD Opteron and AMD Athlon 64 systems.

Because Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 is not supported by any 64-bit
products, .NET Framework is not included on the 64-bit CDs.

The 32-bit version of .NET Framework is also not supported by these
64-bit products and cannot be installed on 32-bit applications running
on 64-bit Windows operating systems (WOW64). This restriction applies
to the current and previous versions of .NET Framework.

6. Now I just need an Athlon 64 :)

Still no SATA driver :(

[Frodo420024]

Gave it a spin on my shiny new box :)

No fun, the SATA driver is not included, it doesn't see my hard drive. Guess I'll have to do it the tricky way, modifying the install CD.

Any Linux's out there in 64 bit versions with a SATA driver out of the box?

Confusion

[nmg196]

I don't understand.

In the Top 5 Reasons to move to Windows XP 64 page it says things like, "Windows XP 64-Bit Edition has been optimized specifically for the Intel Itanium processor" and many other similar comments. It mentions nothing about any Athlon 64bit processors. Yet on the download page it says it only supports the Athlon 64 and Opteron.

Why the massive discrepancy? If the whole thing is optimised for the Itanium, then why isn't the Itanium even supported by the demo version?!

Offtopic: White vs. mirror

[Sique]

I've never been blinded by the sun glinting off a pile of sugar, but I sure have when it glinted off the bumper of my '84 Buick tank.

Go to White Sands, NM ;)

It's a gypsum desert, purely white (ok, ok. It's calcium sulfate, so it's not as bright as titanium dioxide, but there are no titanium dioxide deserts I am aware of).

When I was there in summer (115 F/46C in the non existant shadows!) I had to actually hold my hand below my eyes to see anything, and usual sunglasses wouldn't have helped because they don't shadow the eyes from light coming in from below.

The main difference between white and mirror is that the mirror reflects the sunlight beam in a single direction, and if the mirror has an optical albedo of 0,9 (90% of the visual light gets reflected), you look at 90% of the full sunlight if the reflection of the sunlight hits your eye (which is quite bright), but you get barely anything at other angles (just the reflection of the general brightness of the surroundings).

A white surface doesn't necessarily keep the light beam parallel, so you see a bright surface from a very large angle. A white surface with an optical albedo of 0,99 (only 1% of the visual light gets sucked in and turned into infrared) can be calculated as a new light source, which emits nearly all of the incoming light according to its own characteristics. That means that the light you receive from it depends on the angle you look at it and the distance you have from it. But because the white surface emits the light in different directions, you will never get the full intensity of 99% at a single point, and the intensity decreases further with the square of the distance (if you double your distance to the surface you get a quarter of the intensity).

So even if a white surface may be 10 times more effective as a mirror (with 1% light loss in reflection vs. 10% light loss in reflection), from a certain point the mirror will look brighter: If you stand directly in the reflected light beam.

(Those different properties of reemitting received light are wellknown to the computer graphic specialists, because both effects they get handled differently: For mostly reflecting surfaces like mirrors and polished things ray tracing is a quite good model to calculate the light impression, for matte surfaces like stones, wood and walls radiosity yields better results.)

(PS: Those albedo numbers are made up, but they shouldn't be far away from reality).