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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?
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."
we can now say "finally Windows has caught up with Linux".
Cue the candid laughter everyone.
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.
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.
--- Liberty in our Lifetime
It depends, what do you use your laptop for? Unless you're doing scientific work, or playing a game which is 64-bit optimized, then no.
And even if you are doing those things, only if the drivers are available.
Basically, hold off unless you have no choice
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.
With the .NET Framework as "64-bit native", all .NET apps will immediately benefit, and the JIT compiler can take advantage of all of the goodness of x64.
In the binary world, an upcoming version of SQL Server 2005 x86 is promised.
I should note that the 64-bit .NET Framework isn't actually out yet: I don't believe it was delivered with the 64-bit XP. That was more of a "future focused" comment about an upcoming variant of the .NET Framework 2.0 that will be 64-bit.