The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5) - Windows XP 64 Bit

Windows XP 64 Bit - any takers yet?

Having just purchased an AMD 64 3200+ proc last week, I figured it would be worth a shot to install the beta version when it was released yesterday.

I had nothing but bad luck. BSOD and Registry Hive dumps were the result of the first two installs. After starting in safe mode and disabling plug and play I was finally able to log in. Of course the network and sound card drivers for my MSI K8T NEO MOBO would not install so I gave up.

jason Watts
Thursday, February 5, 2004

64 bit Windows is designed for Itanium, not AMD.

BTW, why the 64-bit proc? How much memory do you have in that box?

Philo

Philo
Thursday, February 5, 2004

Philo, I thought that MicroSoft had Windows 64 working on Opteron a year ago--before Itanium 2, in fact. It seemed like MS and AMD were forming a nice, tight partnership. What happened?

Justin Johnson
Thursday, February 5, 2004

"BTW, why the 64-bit proc? How much memory do you have in that box?"

For AMD, 32-bit is at an end, and 64-bit is the future. Especially since their 64-bit CPUs run damn fast on 32-bit OSes.

Brad Wilson (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com)
Thursday, February 5, 2004

I was under the impression that 64-bit CPU's were all about memory addressing, and the 64bitness didn't really affect processing speed (esp with 32bit code).

Got benchmarks to the contrary?

Philo

Philo
Thursday, February 5, 2004

The Athlon 64 is a fabulously fast processor (especially for development, as a sidenote), so it's just a logical purchase right now -- The 32-bit processors are end-of-lined.

Having said that, you need to subscribe to those internal newsgroups Philo -- Microsoft released the beta of 64-bit Windows for the AMD 64-bit processors (and Intel 64-bit processors if they adopt the AMD extensions, as Microsoft is urging them)

Dennis Forbes
Thursday, February 5, 2004

http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1884&p=14

That article is 4 months or so old, but it does show that the Athlon64 is a great development processor.

Dennis Forbes
Thursday, February 5, 2004

It is indeed available - spefically for the AMD 64 interestingly enough.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/64bit/downloads/upgrade.asp

Why not the 64 bit proc. I have had my 500mhz machine for over 5 years. I plan on having this one for a good long while. Plus, the benchmarks I have read comparing this to the Intel 3.2Ghz machines were VERY impressive.

$800 for the board, proc, 1GB RAM and a new box since the flashly little MSI board will not fit in my old Dell case. Not a bad investment IMHO.

I plan on adding a Canopus video capture card and putting all my home movies onto DVD. Rendering these on my 500 was not a pretty sight.

jason Watts
Friday, February 6, 2004

In the case of the AMD64 architecture, a performance increase can show up when you recompile apps for 64bits, in many cases, due to the 8 additional GPRs.

http://www.sandpile.org/aa64/reg.htm

Jim Battin
Friday, February 6, 2004

"I am a dull and simple lad
Can not tell water from champagne
And I have never met the queen
And I wish I could have all that he has got
I wish I could be like jason Watts"

But then I'm just a tight wad, still running my 300MHz PII.

Friday, February 6, 2004

One of the benefits of 64-bit .NET, by the way, is that your .NET apps will all run seamlessly as 64-bit apps, without any need to recompile. (That is presuming the original app wasn't coded to assume the size of IntPtr would always be 4, which would require a rather unique breed of stupidity.)

I expect that, just like x86-32, that .NET apps will JIT to relatively fast executables on x86-64. This is in contrast to the Itanium architecture, which is (I'm told) very hard to optimize for, given that there's really no history doing it. x86-64 gets a boost, because we've been optimize x86 for a couple decades now.

Brad Wilson (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com)
Friday, February 6, 2004

Windows XP Pro 64 bit for AMD is indeed available.

However, I suspect there are going to be some driver issues for quite a while. Microsoft hasn't yet put up any documentation (that I can find) that specifically addresses the AMD version of Windows 64, but if you read the docs for the Itanium version, it says that you need 64 bit drivers.

i would imagine the same applies to AMD.

Officer Robert Barone
Friday, February 6, 2004

I think it's going to mean that AMD-64 machines running XP 64-bit need to run highly mainstream.

For example, nVidia already has 64-bit XP and 2003 drivers for its video cards, that supports both the IA64 and x86-64 architectures. I wonder how quickly others will pick up on this stuff. x86-64 is not going away, since Intel is hinting they backed the wrong horse and will support x86-64 in the future.

Brad Wilson (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com)
Friday, February 6, 2004