It's been a long time coming, but Microsoft's Jim Allchin said today that the golden release of Windows XP Professional x64 Edition will arrive in April of this year. Previously, the company had said that they were intent on delivering before the end of the first half of this year, and it looks like they were right.
The long awaited release provides 64-bit support for x86 CPUs sporting either AMD64, AMD's 64-bit extension to the x86 architecture, or Intel's Extended Memory 64 Technology, called EM64T for short. The two are virtually identical, although experts believe that Intel merely copied AMD's implementation, with few exceptions. According to a study published by In-Stat's "Microprocessor Report" nearly a year ago, AMD and Intel's 64-bit implementations are not 100% compatible. Close inspection of the architecture used by both companies shows that Intel, for the most part, followed AMD completely, yet there are still enough differences that some applications may perform differently on the two architectures if they are written to privilege one implementation over the other.
"Intel's reverse-engineering of AMD64 marks a major turning point in the historical relationship between the companies," says Halfhill [Senior Editor, Microprocessor Report ]. "Although AMD has in the past introduced some innovations to the x86 architecture-the 3DNow multimedia extensions being a prime example-this is the first time AMD has truly steered the direction of the world's most important microprocessor architecture, which Intel invented in 1978 and has closely guarded for 26 years."
Owners of the Athlon 64 have been waiting quite some time for this, but Intel's customers won't see much use for the new OS version, unless they hop on board with the recent Pentium 600 series, or are lucky enough to have the Xeon Nocona.
You can download or order a trial version of the OS in its current Release Candidate 2 stage here.
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