64-bit: Here It Comes

Revealing one of the worst-kept secrets in the high tech industry since the closely-related delay in the rollout of Intel's 90nm 'Prescott' Pentium 4 CPU (so that Intel could 'secretly' add 64-bit address and instruction set hooks), Bill Gates rolled out the 64-bit versions of Windows XP Professional and Windows Server 2003 during his WinHEC keynote yesterday. Conspiracy theorists will point out that AMD's been shipping 64-bit-capable CPUs since mid-2003, that XP x64 has been in beta almost as long, and rant about Microsoft-Intel collusion. To which I say….bunk.

Well, mostly bunk. Certainly, the two halves of the Wintel Siamese Twin don't want to endure a messy separation that could prove fatal to either, or both. But Microsoft's infatuation with AMD was quite evident at the show, as it's been in the past. And Intel's been equally enthralled with Linux, if for no other reason than as a desperate attempt to patch the gaping, growing holes in the slowly sinking Itanic (err….Itanium). Microsoft simply waited to invest the resources (headcount, time and money) necessary to bring its 64-bit offspring out of beta, until a sufficiently large hardware infrastructure existed to gobble them up and earn a return on that investment. No emotion, no collusion, just a cold, calculated business decision, and a solid one at that. Intel pulled the trigger last Monday. This Monday, it was Microsoft's turn.

Anyhoo, Gates' pitch was heavy on workstations and servers, and light-to-nonexistent on clients. No Microsoft Office-related announcements, not that 64-bit would actually buy you anything there (Clippy runs just fine in 32-bit mode, thankyouverymuch, and I defy anyone to construct an Excel spreadsheet that'll gobble up more than a 2 GByte memory partition). And for all you Windows XP Home users out there, there'll be no upgrade for you; wait for Longhorn (more on that in a moment). The high-end focus for the next 1.5 years (optimistically speaking) begs the question of just how significant a rollout this'll be in terms of incremental software sales, and therefore system (and system building block) sales. The Linux success story in servers is well documented at this point. The guys at Nvidia confirmed last week at NAB what I already suspected; that Linux is a major player in the content creation (workstation) space as well. Linux has supported 64-bit since 64-bit existed in silicon. So what will Microsoft sell, besides a few server upgrades and some $12 XP Pro x64 Edition upgrades, both into existing boxes? Hmmm….

See 'Sleepless In Seattle' for the rest of the story….