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Windows XP X64 Goes Gold
Kasracer writes "According to The Inquirer, 'Microsoft has released the final version of Windows XP 64 to manufacturing, meaning that those with machines that have 64-32 bit processors in from AMD and latterly Intel can now see what the extra addressing brings to the party.'"
...why are they so afraid of pyrites?
Anyone aware of a list of Windows software (perhaps on MS's site) that'll benefit from it?
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It seems to be the season for OS updates, doesn't it? :-)
What I don't understand is why they didn't just pump the money and development time for 64 into Longhorn. Surely that would have brought down development times, and we could have it sooner?
Quoth the server, "404."
Ganymede's report on the CRAPPIEST 64-bit operating systems in the World
1: Windows XP X64
that is all.
Ok, is it still april fool's day somewhere?
Your skill in reading has increased by one point!
Bring on the 64 bit Viruses!
we can now say "finally Windows has caught up with Linux".
Cue the candid laughter everyone.
Yesterday's stories where more convincing.
Now only a few more years and we might have 64 bit applications
What? This is just a new version of Windows XP, afaik it has nothing to do with Longhorn which is a totally new OS.
that those with machines that have 64-32 bit processors in from AMD and latterly Intel
(1) The opteron is a true 64-bit architecture. The em64t (intel thing) is a bit of a bodge (still basically a xeon core, with shades of 32-bit-ness in odd places like memory mapping for devices), but still appears 64 bit.
(2) Linux people have been running x86-64 Linux for _ages_ now. It's a cheap and cheerful server platform without some of the worst cruddiness of x86, and a cheap, extremely cost effective, and generally excellent scientific workstation and compute cluster platform, and is selling like wild here (euro) anyway.
meaning that those with machines that have 64-32 bit processors in from AMD and latterly Intel can now see what the extra addressing brings to the party.
...Unless you want to run hardware not built
into a mainstream motherboard with support
included in XP.
...Unless you want to run software using a
legacy 16-bit installer (far more common than
you might expect, even for programs that don't
have a drop of 16-bit code themselves).
XP for x64 has NO 32-bit hardware driver support. Very very few manufacturers have x64 drivers available yet. Thus, don't feel surprised when you literally can't use any of your fancy toys. On the bright side, NVidia does have beta 64-bit drivers available, so you might luck out. Of course, considering the stability of final-release NVidia drivers, do you really want to use a beta?
XP x64 has also completely dropped 16bit support. No more old DOS programs. No more Win3.1 programs. More importantly (as I mentioned above), no more installers that used 16 bit code, even for purely 32-bit programs.
I too look forward to running XP x64 on my Athlon64. But for the moment, the average Joe just doesn't have that as a realistic option. In another six months, perhaps. But not yet.
"Anyone aware of a list of Windows software (perhaps on MS's site) that'll benefit from it?"
Solitaire.
I run XP on an AMD64 laptop. Would I gain anything by upgrading to this or not?
No, Longhorn is the (code) name for the next version of Windows. XP-64 is just an upgrade, adding the 64 bit addressing possibilities to the Windows XP OS.
Longhorn will not be out until next year at the earliest.
No. This is just Windows XP. Games and other apps will have to be recompiled to take advantage of it - UT2004 has a beta out, don't know of any others available.
LightWave 3D, by NewTek.
MS Gold can actually rust
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
/me ducks.
Stick Men
Or they could have used SUSE and have seen what it does, what, 5 months ago?
I am trolling
--- Liberty in our Lifetime
I thought longhorn was XP + 64-bit.
I don't know where all misinformation about Longhorn being aimed for 64-bit processors come from. I keep seeing it everywhere on forums.
Longhorn will be released just like Windows XP; in 32- and 64-bit editions.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
As processor speed, memory and disk space continue to spiral to ever larger values, Microsoft is really going to be put to task in finding ways to make Windows sluggish.
Their task is made more difficult by advances in compiler design which find an eliminate trivial solutions that simply chew up CPU time by computing huging cosine tables and then overwriting them.
New innovation may come from recent advances in polling network devices unnecessarily and hanging various threads until a reply is received. In the case of pulling a device off the network that Windows Explorer had browsed in the last 15 weeks, a given thread can hang for minutes, chewing up processor time in loops that scan network traffic.
The Windows Development team seems optimistic that they can produce the same crippled user interface on new 64 bit architectures that customers have become familiar with, a valuable marketing strategy in teaching consumers to become suspicious of computers with more responsive interfaces.
The advantages of the AMD-64 archetecture go far beyond the additional address space. The number of general purpose registers is doubled (and, of course made 64 bits wide). This is far more important than the increased address space and, for most code more important than being 64 versus 32 bit.
Translation: If you've never heard of a register, what this means is that there are twice as many internal storage locations in the processor. moving data between internal registers suffers from no delay, while accesses to memory (ram) is slow and processing cycles can be lost to wait states - basically the processor must pause and wait for the memory access to get done.
This is why most code when recompiled for the new architecture will see an immediate performance improvement. Some code will see gains from the 64 bit width of these registers - but not as much. Virtually no one will see a benefit from being able to use more than 4gb of ram.
Just like Microsoft - one day too late.
Maybe it's my tinfoil hat speaking, but isn't it strange that Microsoft release a 64bit OS just a few weeks after Intel releases their 64bit x86 cpu http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/ 22/0235246&tid=118&tid=137 even though AMD have had their processor out for more than eighteen months?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Microsoft has a website for Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. The site has a pseudo-technical overview of the product, and more detailed information for developers.
Windows XP X64 went gold on March 31 and we see it on /. two days later?
Tiger went gold on April 1 and no time was wasted in posting that news.
Both are closed source operating systems.
Explain.
Grab a 64-bit Linux distribution. Yet another benefit of opensource is that people can freely recompile to 64-bit. I'm running 64-bit KDE 3.4.0 on my 64-bit Linux 2.6.11 on my Opteron 3000+. It runs WoW under 32-bit Cedega nicely as well (in addition to Starcraft/Diablo, etc). No need to chain yourself to a legacy OS for a few applications you can easily run in Linux :)
I run Slamd64, the x86-64 Slackware.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.