Windows XP-64 Delayed Into 2005 323
vincecate writes "Although
Windows XP on AMD64 was demoed at ComDex in 2002,
Microsoft is now
delaying the release till the first half of 2005.
Given Microsoft's history on this product, it could be
even more than a year before it is really released.
At least
one person at Intel says they did not ask Microsoft to delay
the release.
In any case, for the near future if you want to run a 64 bit operating
system you will either be using
one of the free Linux versions
or the
free download of Windows XP-64 beta.
Though Sun started well after Microsoft, they are
progressing well on their Solaris port to AMD64 and could well release earlier."
MS vs. Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:MS vs. Linux (Score:2, Insightful)
Because Longhorn might not stable (enough)?
Re:MS vs. Linux (Score:2, Informative)
So, compare free WinXP64 to waiting ad infinitum for Longhorn.
Re:MS vs. Linux (Score:2, Interesting)
Better late than buggy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Better late than buggy (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Better late than buggy (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Better late than buggy (Score:3, Interesting)
64 bit OS (Score:5, Funny)
Re:64 bit OS (Score:5, Funny)
Re:64 bit OS (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:64 bit OS (Score:2)
Funny timing... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Funny timing... (Score:2)
Yes they have (Score:2)
-Charlie
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11668
http
Re:Funny timing... (Score:2)
Re:Funny timing... (Score:3, Interesting)
If Intel gets another year to catch up, that's okay. In fact, it may lend credibility to a market in which AMD is
Not at all (Score:3, Informative)
-Charlie
Countdown... (Score:3, Funny)
Bashing has commenced.
Scrab
Re:Countdown... (Score:5, Funny)
Captain: Quick into the time machine to stop this all from happening at the wrong time.
Sarg: I'll go
Sarg: I'm back
Captain: how can you be back? this reality was supposed to just disappear if you suceeded.
Sarg: that particular mission objective could not be satisfied. Instead I changed the earth's rotation on it's axis so that the microsoft bashing would occur in the right "time zone" thus making the parent poster, technically, correct.
Captain: that's absurd!
Sarg: well, at least we tried, sir.
Captain: true. How did you get the earth to move?
Sarg: I went back in time and aided the release of I, robot with will smith. Asimov was buried in the perfect location to allow for a violent spinning in his grave to realign the earth.
supported linux versions available as well (Score:4, Informative)
There are supported linux versions available as well. I know Red Hat and SuSE have released versions supporting the amd64 and I think Mandrake does as well
Re:supported linux versions available as well (Score:5, Informative)
Re:supported linux versions available as well (Score:2)
Re:supported linux versions available as well (Score:2, Funny)
Re:supported linux versions available as well (Score:2, Interesting)
forgot one OS... (Score:4, Insightful)
Or you'll be running Mac OS X...
Re:forgot one OS... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:forgot one OS... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:forgot one OS... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:forgot one OS... (Score:4, Informative)
Like you said, lots of people get confused by x86-64 bringing such a performance jump, but that's because x86-64 brings some major additions to the architechture. With the G5, 64 bitness mearly means it can natively do 64 bit math.
Mac? (Score:2, Informative)
Um, what about Mac OS X?
Re:Mac? (Score:5, Informative)
Note They Said "Near Future" (Score:2)
Key qualifier: near future
OS X Tiger will be 64 bit, but that isn't scheduled for release until 02005 either.
SteveM
Re:Note They Said "Near Future" (Score:2)
Let's say I am considering purchasing a 64 bit AMD system. If I am a home user and not into prosumer video or photo editing, what are the base system requirements and the apps that will make the investment worthwhile?
Re:Mac? (Score:3, Informative)
Quality Driven (Score:2, Interesting)
Doesn't that mean they have to pack more crap into it so it runs slower than molasses in winter?
Really, though, it's nice if they are working on the quality of the product. Maybe this one won't ever crash, eh?
Re:Quality Driven (Score:2, Insightful)
Where is the -1 Ludicrous button?
What they are really saying is that XP64 has so many problems it cannot be released. Or they are attempting to fix the gaping worm holes (why is that an Apple is less susceptible to worms than a Window?)
Re:Quality Driven (Score:2)
I'll make sure my pointers are explicit in my future rants (to avoid overflows into 'good' data areas)
*BSD (Score:5, Informative)
NetBSD [netbsd.org]
OpenBSD [openbsd.org]
64 bit operating systems (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been running a 64-bit operating system for the past five or six years, and it isn't one of those mentioned. It just happens to be OpenVMS [hp.com] running on Alpha.
Re:64 bit operating systems (Score:2)
Re:64 bit operating systems (Score:3, Funny)
Sledghammer-proof hardware.
This sucker is so large that you can tell people you keep a copy of the Internet on it, and they believe you.
It's a shame, really... (Score:3, Interesting)
These people that are fixated on the current X86/PC world have missed out on the elegant hardware of Sun, SGI, and DEC.
Yes, kids, there was a world before Linux became popular.
Re:64 bit operating systems (Score:4, Informative)
Re:64 bit operating systems (Score:2)
And as usual, Microsoft is late to the party (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:And as usual, Microsoft is late to the party (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:And as usual, Microsoft is late to the party (Score:4, Informative)
MS historically is not that good at portability. NT on powerpc, alpha, mips(maybe) failed. MS apps are not like *nix apps where most of them are designed from the ground up to be portable across platforms, including different byte ordering and default word sizes. Linux and the BSDs have this in their OS _and_ in their apps. Even if MS were to have a working version of XP for 64bit platforms, there would be no apps for it.
One thing that kills me are the MS macros/typedefs for working in their system. For example, the DWORD (unsigned long, 4 bytes) means "double word" which is left over from the 16bit days (2x 2 bytes). However, on most 32bit systems an int and a long are the same size (4 bytes each), on 16bit systems they are 2 bytes and 4 bytes respecively, and on 64bit systems they are 4 and 8 bytes respectively. People run into problems when they are expecting a DWORD == pointer size, and so on.
One of MS's strong points is its backwards compatability, one of Linux and other unixlike things (including solaris) is that they are forward compatable.
MS has got some work to do to play in a heterogenious world (read not IA32).
Other OS than Linux supports.... (Score:3, Informative)
You might have noticed that there are other 64 bit CPU's than AMD64 that are in wide use, and other OS than Linux suports AMD64.
FreeBSD [freebsd.org] supports AMD64, and so does NetBSD [netbsd.org].
Also OpenBSD [openbsd.org] supports it, but the support is even better in current. In addition, OpenBSD will use the NX-bit to increase security.
So this still means (Score:2, Funny)
Yay!
The comment about Sun is not fair. (Score:3, Insightful)
Windows has been 32 bits for quite a while, so the jump to 64 is a bigger step than for Sun.
Re:The comment about Sun is not fair. (Score:3, Insightful)
WOW64 (Score:2, Insightful)
Having played with the beta of XP64 on my laptop, I can tell you that the driver support on XP64 absolutely sucks. There are hardly any drivers, and good luck finding any for older/abnormal hardware.
WOW64, if you're not familiar with the acronym, means windows on windows 64. It's basically their "emulator" (it's more of an interpreter) to run code not compiled for 64 bit. Instead of going the FreeBSD route and allowing for both
Re:WOW64 (Score:5, Informative)
Lies.
Windows and FreeBSD both do exactly the same thing, which is to let 32-bit programs run at full-speed, natively, on the cpu. Practically the whole point of AMD64 architecture is backwards compatibility. The world didn't need another Itanium.
WOW64 Implementation Details [microsoft.com]
Re:WOW64 (Score:2)
I wouldn't consider the current public beta a fair look at WinXP64 at all, considering that it's nearly a year old. Microsoft didn't even have theming(the stuff that makes WinXP look like WinXP) in at the time, let alone have things optimized or have a decent collection of drivers. Things have supposedly changed a lot in that last year, and the devs have said that they're trying to get a new public beta released to show that.
One person? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sure that at least one person at Intel did not ask Microsoft to delay the release. It would be kind of weird if all 80,000 employees asked. I'm sure it was no more than 50,000 of them who did.
Solaris has been 64-bits since 1995 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Solaris has been 64-bits since 1995 (Score:4, Interesting)
Is this a good business move? (Score:2)
As an AMD supporter, I'd rather them make it available sooner so that AMD might be able to leverage their lead in the 64-bit field. But from Microsoft's perspective? This might be the best move.
(of course, all of this ignores that they're usually c
Lack of drivers (Score:5, Insightful)
Whenever I shop for new hardware, I look at the drivers first -- having good drivers is more important than the hardware itself.
Chip H.
You forgot (Score:2)
Anyone know why? (Score:2)
For example, does their really weird size conventions (with 64-bit pointers but 32-bit long) cause more porting problems than it solves?
Has anyone here tried porting a program to Win64?
Yes (Score:4, Informative)
They are taking security seriously, but they are realizing exactly how impossible it is to do what they announced, IE lock things down. The deeper they dig, the more problems they find. The more they find, the more people they pull in.
People tell me that it is a quagmire of monumental proportions. Golly, who would have guessed.
-Charlie
(I write for the Inq, and I talk to people, this is more than idle speculation)
Upgrades from existing x86-64 hardware? (Score:2)
I write for the Inq, and I talk to people, this is more than idle speculation
Here's our big dilemma: We're looking at making a big investment in new AMD x86-64 hardware, especially the new line of 940-socket motherboards from Tyan.
Compare e.g. the S2880-S2885 line (http://www.tyan.com/products/html/matrix.html [tyan.com]) - I don't think we'll be able to afford the S4880 range.
So here's my question: If we invest in this hardware, what do you think the chances will be that, when Win64 finally starts to appear ne
MS Still 16 bit? (Score:3, Interesting)
(We don't have to count code for 16 bit compatibility)
Linux and OS2 were the only entirely 32-bit maintstream PC OS from the start.
Re:MS Still 16 bit? (Score:2)
Seriously, Windows NT has been 32bit since the very begining, only WOW (Windows on Windows, the subsystem that provides Win16 compatibility) contains some 16bit code.
Re:MS Still 16 bit? (Score:3, Informative)
Win32s, for example was a porting layer to run a subset (hence the s) of the Win32 32-bit APIs on Win16 Operating Systems. (0% 32-bit by definition)
Windows 95 was a 32-bit OS with 16-bit loadable sections for backward compatibility. If you didn't run 16-bit drivers or apps, you didn't have 16-bit.
The Windows NT family (Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003) were written from the start as 32-bit/64-bit hybrids with their architecture at
*BSD (Score:2)
- FreeBSD also has a decent AMD64 port
- "of course it runs NetBSD (tm)"
- OpenBSD too lists it as supported target
- DragonFly BSD has it in the works (they wanted to release 1.0 first)
From these I daily use FreeBSD on a dual Opteron box, and it works fast and stable. I have no experience with the others.
AMD64 Linux stability (Score:3, Informative)
Any user of a 64 bit x86 system should expect all 32 bit applications for that system to "just work". That's certainly not the case for linux and I expect Microsoft has a much higher standard in that regard.
What a load of crap (Score:2)
I smell a troll. If you actually spend any time setting up an AMD-64 with linux you know that it is all still very experimental (and this is clearly told on user forums). Basically it is only for people who really know what they are doing. If anyone told you it was plug and play then go kick them.
As for stability, I have setup up three opteron servers with gentoo (none of that binary crap for me thank you
Re:What a load of crap (Score:3, Insightful)
How is the beta? (Score:2)
Does anyone have any experience?
Is this really a negative? (Score:2)
One clarification about the main article (Score:3)
"At least one person at Intel says they did not ask Microsoft to delay the release"
It suggests that only Intel people told me that it wasn't them. That is not exactly what I would call persuasive evidence. In fact it was AMD people who told me flat out that Intel had nothing to do with it. I then asked Intel, and they said 'yup, we a innocent'. MS also said it wasn't Intel.
Now, if Intel WAS behind it, AMD would have told me, and the other two would have denied it. That didn't happen.
-Charlie
Quality-driven (Score:2)
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA...
But seriously.. this could be a good thing.
Misleading Title (Score:4, Insightful)
And lost in this discussion is whether the x86 architecture is actually good for consumers in the long run? It's got tons of exceptions, has an asymmetric instruction set, and is really outdated.
It's time to break the compatibility chain to allow forward progress. Kind of like depending on BIOS, ISA architecture, etc.
I'm so tired of M$ portrayed on Slashdot as a comic-book villain, often without substantial discussion of the issues.
Re:Windows is not designed for these things (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Windows is not designed for these things (Score:2)
While people contend that linux has good 64 bit support, you have to remember that windows is designed and optimized for 32 bit x86. That's why microsoft compilers will beat gcc in terms of x86 speed. I think the Linux design for portability makes more sense i
Re:Windows is not designed for these things (Score:5, Informative)
And by the way, the original NT moniker was actually a reference to the CPU simulator - named N-Ten - that the first i960-native builds of what became Windows NT ran on.
Re:Windows is not designed for these things (Score:2)
Re:Windows is not designed for these things (Score:3, Informative)
NT was actually prototyped on the Intel i860 processor - I know as I used to work for MS and have seen some of the original dev kit (co-processor boards that plugged into another system). But once it was obvious that the i860 was not going to be the 'next great thing' from Intel, they switched to x86.
Re:Windows is not designed for these things (Score:3, Informative)
Windows NT (and family) have shipped in x86, Alpha, Clipper, PowerPC and were ported to several other chips as tests.
It's also worth noting that the Windows API is NOT native to the Windows NT family and anothe
Re:Windows is not designed for these things (Score:5, Informative)
Hmm, why is this modded as Informative? Windows NT ran on MIPS (I've seen it running on modified SGI Indy boxes), PowerPC, Alpha and x86. The HAL makes it possible. Windows 2000 Beta was running on Alpha. What makes you think Windows is an x86-only product?
Mike Bouma
Re:Windows is not designed for these things (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Windows is not designed for these things (Score:2)
And having OS run on an arch is sooo different from having apps available for that arch. Even GNU/Linux have this issues.
Re:Windows is not designed for these things (Score:2, Interesting)
Except for when Windows (NT) ran on Power PC, DEC Alpha, AXP, and MIPS [wikipedia.org]. They even had a prototype for the Sun SPARC.
Re:Windows is not designed for these things (Score:2)
Re:Windows is not designed for these things (Score:2)
Not quite always.
"Portability is for people who cannot write new programs"
-- Linus Torvalds, on comp.os.minix, 29 Jan 1992
Re:Windows is not designed for these things (Score:3, Informative)
You're right though - considering the number of both 32 and 64-bit ports of the linux kernel, targeting amd-64 was just about filling in the missing pieces.
If you hunt around the linux source tree, you will find this asm/generic stuff, which is an implementation in C of the stuff that should really be done in the architecure's assembly (cause that would be faster/efficient). Thats the stuff they
Re:Windows is not designed for these things (Score:4, Insightful)
I think Microsoft will delay the release of the x86-64 version of Windows XP so 1) they can get true 64-bit driver support and 2) they can recode all the programs that come with WinXP to true 64-bit versions (Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, and so on). It also gives more time for third-party software vendors to complete development of true 64-bit versions of their software, too.
Re:64 bit os (Score:5, Informative)
Re:is this even news? (Score:5, Funny)
You must be new here.
Re:OS X 10.4 not 64 Bit (Score:2)
Re:OS X 10.4 not 64 Bit (Score:3, Informative)
and yes, it looks rather attractive, as usual.
Re:OS X 10.4 not 64 Bit (Score:2)
I'm glad to see you know so much about an OS that HASN'T BEEN RELEASED YET.
OS X 10.3.4 isn't 64 bit, but 10.4 is suppose to be.
Re:Why does this matter? (Score:2)
If I remember correctly, Joe-Blow SixPack was convinced to switch from Win16 to Win32 by means of a song "You Start Me Up" by The Rolling Stones. My guess is that this time the argument will be quite similar - my bet goes on "When I'm Sixty Four" by The Beatles.
Joe six (Score:2)
This all means quite a bit to joe sixpack, you see...
So? Welcome to real life (Score:2)
At least most games nowadays support more then one resolution (yes I am talking about you bioware).
64-bit is going to take an awfull lot of time to make it into games. Look for the ID and Epic games to support it first. They are the front runners. Everyone else will be trailing way way behind.
64 bit has perhaps the biggest advant
Athlon XP? Ask a beta user (Score:2)
Basically the question is how bad is the beta. We know that SP2 is bad because people who use it say it is. So how is the XP-64 beta holding up? Does it work or not? Is it slow? No support for hardware? If there are real enormous gigantic bugs then MS couldn't release without getting burned once again.
Can MS really b
Bullsh*t (Score:3, Informative)
Now, who do you believe, high ups at AMD AND Intel, with a couple of Microsofties thrown in for color, or an anonymous person on
There was a reason I wrote the article, it was to keep posts like this from coming up every few hours. I now see my fatal mistake was assuming the trolls can read.