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64-Bit Windows Releases Now Available
SimplyJeff writes "Athlon 64 users rejoice! Today at WinHEC 2005 in Seattle, Microsoft announced availability of the 64-bit editions of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. Strangely (and possibly a sign the drivers aren't yet up to snuff), Microsoft will not sell the 64-bit releases in retail outlets. For now, only new PC buys can get Windows x64 Edition as an option. However, those who purchased Windows XP after March 31, 2003, can trade in their copy for the 64-bit version at a cost of $12 and a voided warranty. Although, x64 users will get one free support call to Microsoft." Reader bonch adds a link to CNET's review of the OS.
Great, now all people need are some applications really designed to take advantage of it....
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
April '03 is when the original AMD64 Opterons shipped. Therefore nearly every Windows user of x64 hardware is covered by this program.
(Exception would be if you bought the $300 retail version and transfered it to your x64 machine.)
You can get it on a machine and Microsoft will support you. Doesn't sound like Beta to me.
If you were Microsoft, would you like to deal with the long line of tech support calls explaining why the new version of Windows doesn't work on a Pentium Pro.
For the market they are targetting, their sales strategy makes perfect sense.
A speech...
At this stage of the game it doesn't make any sense for most users to switch to 64 bit XP. It isn't mature enough and doesn't have enough driver support. This is being put out there so that businesses that have a special need for 64bit computing (for example large memory address space) can get started.
Expect to see plenty of patching and continued development moving forward.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
That a major vendor will release an important piece of software on some future date is newsworthy.
That Microsoft actually shipped something when they said they would is also newsworthy.
I was under the impression that amd64 chips are called x86_64 and not x64. Anyways, what good will a 64bit OS do to me if most of the apps for it are still 32bit?
Cheers,
RoadkillBunny
Unfortunately, WOWEXEC for 16-bit applications no longer exists -- there is no way to run 16-bit applications in 64-bit Windows. The biggest issue with this (aside from the fact that programs like DOSBox are still too slow and incompatible with many late DOS applications) is that many fully 32-bit Windows programs used 16-bit installers. No good.
[insert witty comment here]
although it's not going to make a beans worth of difference to most of us Athlon 64 users, since Linux systems have been running in 64-bit native mode for some time now.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Athlon 64 users rejoice! Today at WinHEC 2005 in Seattle, Microsoft announced availability of the 64-bit editions of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.
You spout off about the joys of linux. But,when Microsoft comes crawling with a 64-bit OS, you fall over like a bitch in heat. Sadness
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
If it was sold in a box in stores, people who don't know what it is might pick it up and try to install it. Very few people have 64-bit processors - certainly the average consumer who buys software from a retailer does not. This way they can control it: you only get the 64-bit version of Windows if you actually have a 64-bit processor.
The poster implied their reason was lack of support. I think it's lack of interest.
Microsoft already had a 64bit Windows running on DEC/Compaq Alpha. Why in the hell did it take so long for this release? The whole point of having HAL was portability.
r l= /library/en-us/win64/win64/wow64_implementation_de tails.asp
What the heck did they do to Windows to make the port take so long? AMD64 support should have taken a year at most. And why in the Hell do I still have to thunk down to 32bits (Go lookup 64bit Windows and thunking)? Not that I need it, but I'm just curious.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?u
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
Now that it has been released, what 64-bit compilers are available for the operating system? The last time I looked, Microsoft was planning to use an ugly data model (LLP64) where only "long long" variables and pointers would be 64-bits. To me, that's a chicken-shit decision, broken code should be fixed or rewritten, not accommodated by crippling the compiler.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
- Gentoo Linux for AMD64 has been out for well over a year. Plenty of other distros have too.
- Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, and other Unices have been 64-bit for years (not in the x86 architecture, but still, it's there).
- No drivers for my video card, wireless card, DVD+/-RW drive(!), etc., in Windows. If I upgrade Windows on this box (a brand new notebook) to the 64-bit edition, no games, networking, or burning for me. Wheee! But hey, "this is Windows" so I should be happy! Office should be enough for anybody.
:) - You ain't putting your CPU to "good use" until your apps are rebuilt as 64-bit binaries, and really only math-intensive apps (and less so for memory and system bandwidth intensive apps) are going to benefit. Photoshop might benefit a little, but not much. Games, again, maybe, but not much.
- Switching from 32-bit to 64-bit just for the fun of it will just cripple what you can currently do on the Windows platform right now. In Linux land, it all "just works" (with very few exceptions).
I'm no fan of Windows, but for once I can honestly say "64-bit Windows is the wrong tool for most every job right now."Read my stuff.
No, Windows doesn't have an inate ability to do anything better. Nowhere in gp's statement did I read a claim that this was the case. "Best" does not denote just pure technical capacity. It can mean many things, such as user experience or availability of professional-quality product.
To further belabor the point and repeatedly kick a dead horse, the general gaming experience on Linux blows compared to what is available for Windows. This is not due to a technical fault in Linux. It is also not due some technical superiority in Windows. It is simply a description of the current market experience.
There was no BS in gp's statement. I don't like Microsoft either, but I like knee-jerk, unthinking FUD even less.
If they called it a Public Beta, they wouldn't be able to claim they shipped XP/64 before Apple ships Tiger on Friday. The fact that they are throttling the availability by limiting it to OEMs and people with a pre-installed copy of XP Pro indicates (to me at least) that they really don't have a full production ramp-up yet.
Of course, nobody's going to remember this attempt at 3-day one-upsmanship in the long run, because Tiger's retail availability and the lifting of the NDA surrounding it is going to drown out the select few people waiting for their copies of XP/64 to be delivered. Not to mention the new eye-candy and search features Tiger has, while XP/64 is very much an under-the-hood upgrade.
I might be overly cynical, however...
So, what you're saying is that MS should fix the stupidity of their users before they release more operating systems?
The word "Call" is a bit misleading in the article. It states the an a user can trade up their copy of XP32 to XP64 but voids the warrenty.
Warrenty support at Microsoft entitles somone to 2 free support incidents. An inceident can be 20 calls or more until the issue is resolved. As you can see now, using the word "call" can be misleading
So, it you trade in your copy to get XP64 you're really only loseing out on one support incident which are like $35 bucks or something.
"It's not rocket science, Smithers! It's only brain surgery!" --Mr. Burns
You are only partially correct. While you are correct that AMD64's hardware design does not allow for real-mode 16-bit code, it does allow for 16-bit code execution as long as it is protected-mode (so, Win16s applications should be able to work without a problem). (Source)
[insert witty comment here]
If you need a variable to store a pointer, but don't know what type it'll be pointing to yet, use void * and cast it to the appropriate pointer type once you do know.
On a 32 bit system, a pointer will be 32 bits, on a 64 bit system, and pointer will be 64 bits.
However, there is no gaurantee that on a 64 bit system an int will be 64 bits - it could quite easily be 32.
int only _has_ to be at least 16 bits. It's usually the word size, which is usually the size of a pointer, but it doesn't have to be.
char = at least 8 bits.
short int = at least 16 bits
int = at least 16 bits
long int = at least 32 bits
> also wouldn't he need to do:
> struct device_info foo=*((struct device_info*)&a_ulDeviceHandle);
No, I suspect what he meant wasYour version wouldn't work because you can't assign a struct to another struct, you can only assign a pointer to a struct to another pointer to a struct.
In C, variables only contain numbers, not objects, as there is no concept of object - only a vague illusion every now and then via pointers - so assigning a struct makes no sense.
In that sense, C is very weakly typed, and type checking is only done at compile time. That makes casting values of different precision very dangerous, because the cast eliminates the only way through which you would detect these errors.
Advanced users are users too!
Actually, most opensource linux drivers are written in C and are architecture independant... A lot of older devices don't have drivers for the 64bit windows atall, while the existing architecture-neutral drivers for linux are supported just fine, infact many of these devices were already supported by 64bit linux on alpha, ppc and sparc for many years, many linux drivers already existed and worked perfectly on 64bit architectures before amd64 even existed.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Of course you probably do not care about the difference, but when people say Linux supports 64 bits, we mean it has supported 64-bit mode on 64-bit CPUs for upwards of 10 years such as on the Alpha I kept in my apartment in college. That it is also supporting AMD64 processors is almost trivial.
You are right that there are a bunch of "desktop" apps and drivers which only really work on i386 currently, but most of the people who care about 64 bit don't need those on Linux or Windows. They need to be able to run their scientific/engineering/database apps or develop them.
Several applications in the background do _not_ count, because those can and do get different data and code segments. You _can_ support that without going 64 bit, and Intel's Xeon addressing did so for years already.
So does Photoshop allocate a single array of more than 4 GB? I seriously doubt that.
At 4 bytes per pixel (32 bit colour) you'd need more than 1 _billion_ pixels in a photo. I.e., you'd need to work on a picture larger than 32768 pixel tall and and 32768 wide.
Even if you print it in 300 dpi (most posters are printed in a much more coarse resolution) and wanted each dot to be its individual pixel, we're talking a roughly 110x110 inch area. I.e., a 9x9 ft poster. (About 3m by 3m in metric.)
That's already billboard sized, and those are definitely printed in an order of magnitude lower DPI.
I don't know, I just don't see many home users actually working on 32k by 32k pictures, or not every day. Heck, I doubt that any professional artist does that daily.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Strangely (and possibly a sign the drivers aren't yet up to snuff), Microsoft will not sell the 64-bit releases in retail outlets. For now, only new PC buys can get Windows x64 Edition as an option.
a: not strange
b: nothing to do with drivers:
1: makes people upgrade to faster machine anyway - wow this runs faster (more ram etc)
2: bouys IT industry with another round of upgrades
delta: microsoft often make people upgrade thier os to have a new media plyer, browser or web server, if they made it.
So not suprising.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Erm.... b***ocks. I'm running Linux on an Athlon64 for six months now, and everything's there and functional on the hardware you mention.
OK there's no 64 bit openoffice yet, but the 32 bit binary version works perfectly.
You're talking utter rubbish. Everything works, including IDE, SATA, Gigabit Ethernet, 8x AGP and accelerated graphics. It plays Doom 3 like a dream.
WTF did you do wrong?!!
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
WTF did you do wrong?!!
If you read his post carefully, you'll notice that he bought an ATI card.
I call Bullshit.
i have been running linux on a dual Opteron for 4 months now with NO problems. granted I went Nvidia, and they care about releasing drives for linux people so I had no problems there... UT2004 in 64 bit (yup the 64 bit version of the linux app is on the install CD's) is screaming fast. All drivers are there in 64 bit goodness, SATA is happy as well as my u320 Scsi raid.
Care to actually list the hardware you claim that there was no support for? Myself and several others in the LUG have no problems with 64bit linux. Also anyone having a shit fit over an office app running in 32 bit mode really needs to get a life. We have been using Suse 9.2 and it runs all the 32 bit apps happily on the 64 bit system. If you were a real gentoo user you would have known how to get 32 bit emulation turned on.
here, waht help? this obscure website
Suse has it set up for you already, but as a Gentoo user you must be an advanced linux pro to choose it over a newbie distro like Suse that configures everything for you already.
this is NOT a dig on Gentoo users, you guys typically are levels above the "I hate text files" crowd, I just know that the parent is lying and am trying to make a point about it.
if the parent is actually truthful i strongly suggest he choose a distro that has more automatic configurations and is ready for 64 bit like Suse.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.