Microsoft hypes Windows XP 64bit Edition for Athlon

MICROSOFT TIPPED UP in Cannes to pay homage to the Athlon 64 but it was never quite certain what line the firm would follow. As it turned out, Rolf Schauder, Director of OEM Sales for Central Europe, was on hand to give out the news about progress on the 64bit version of Windows for the AMD64 series of processors.

Some sceptics have wondered whether Microsoft was truly committed to producing a version of Windows for the AMD64 processors and, given the amount of time it has taken the firm to come clean about its intentions, that scepticism could be forgiven.

In the event, Schauder waxed lyrical about the need for 64bit, hailing the AMD64 architecture's memory capabilities, floating point speed and its ability to run 32bit programs.

The failure of Microsft to deliver a fully working 64-bt operating system was the only black cloud in AMD's sunny skies. But, to show how far the firm is along the path to releasing Windows XP 64bit Edition for AMD64, every journo at the event was given a copy of the Beta 1 Build 1069. The operating system is already available to registered developers. Schauder reckoned that the final release would be with us before the second half of next year.

Dave "Colin" Everitt, AMD's European Product Manager, was on hand to demonstrate what so many wanted to know. If all you cared about were office applications and surfing the Net, there'd be no need to shift to 64bit. Dave didn't bother showing that kind of stuff, he went straight for Unreal Tournament 2003. After all, the Athlon 64 is targeted at gamers.

Coupled with a top-of-the-range nVidia graphics card, an Athlon 64 FX running a 32bit version of UT2003 on 64bit Windows cranked out 279FPS in Flyby and 93FPS in Botmatch. That was pretty much exactly the same speed as it achieved running on 32bit Windows. Just to give some comparison, Dave had an XP3200+ run the UT benchmark too, that managed 197 and 71FPS. It would be interesting to see how much of a boost a 64bit version of UT would give.

This seemed to confirm Microsoft's thoughts. Schauder said that it was home users who drove the market upward in terms of performance. He said that was particularly so in Europe where more people buy the biggest and best hardware in comparison with the US where low end machines are dominant. Considering the way that LAN parties are taking off in the States, this seemed somewhat surprising but who are we to argue with Microsoft? µ