Is MS hanging fire on 64-bit Opteron support?

One 64-bit OS is conspicuous by its absence, it would appear.

Microsoft has outlined, according to the article, four different types of .NET server - Web, Standard, Enterprise and Datacenter - and the article gives an interesting table describing the differences between these products.

In particular, the table outlines IA-64 support, memory requirements, Numa support and also whether the products will support multiple CPUs.

The OSes are tailored to the type of CPU, as the table shows, but what's interesting here is that there doesn't seem to be support for the X86-64 platform - very puzzling, considering that Microsoft was cheering this on earlier in the year, as reported here.

The article speculates that X86-64 support could be deferred for quite some time.

Whatever Microsoft is doing, it obviously didn't describe 64-bit OS support for AMD's Hammer family to the journalists.

The article suggests Microsoft might allow the Opteron family to be reliant on Linux OS support for several years.

But perhaps, and we think this must be the case, Microsoft just wanted to confine itself to IA-64 platforms in these presentations.

Here's the Babelfished page. µ

See Also
AMD, Microsoft firm up 64-bit deal
Microsoft support for Hammer goes way back
AMD-Microsoft Hammer memo leaked
AMD-Microsoft Hammer memo is genuine