64 Bits and AMD, A Year Later - Intel Was Right to Wait
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So it seems not just me that has an aversion to 64 bit compiled programs. The people who make this software feel the same way, or at least their actions to this point would indicate that. More than a year after the introduction of the Athlon64, and a "beta" Windows operating system to support it, there's still very very few applications ported to it. In fact, of the programs I found, nearly all were "open source" to begin with, and could have been ported by just about anyone with programming knowledge. There was a near complete lack of support from the standard vendors. Is this another case of "chicken or the egg"?
This whole situation is why I agree with Intel regarding 64bit. It's simply something not needed by end users, outside of the server and workstation market. And even for those individuals, it's really the memory support that will be a boon for them, not the 64 bit integers. Heck, I'm using a system which was capable of 64 bit while Intel was still transitioning from 16 to 32, and yet only bother using a 32 bit environment and user space the vast majority of the time. After all, doubling the register size doesn't make the Internet faster, my audio playback better, or cause me to type this article any quicker.
I hope that this brings you up to speed on the current state of WindowsXP 64 Bit Editon for Extended Systems. While drivers for integrated devices have become pretty decent, for everything else it's rather dodgy. Thirty-two bit programs for the most part seem to work without too much effort, but there's an utter and disturbing lack of ones ported to work with the now available 64. And we're still waiting for a "real" version of the whole OS to make its way onto shelves. In other words, one year later not much has changed.
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