Windows XP 64 bit
Well, nice try Microsoft, but you fell short.
I was looking at windows XP 64 bit, and ran across this, which is info from Microsoft about windows XP 64 bit. Several things I find interesting:
Nice job Microsoft, great job on developing your product. This is one area where the UNIX RISC platforms have been light years ahead of the X86 market. Sun put out its first 64 bit system in 1995 (the Ultra 1), long before it had a 64 bit OS. Solaris 2.6 released in august of 1997 could address 64 bits of memory, and solaris 7 released in October of 1998 had full 64 bit support.
Sun did two things right:
1. the 64 bit CPUs could still run in 32 bit mode
2. the 64 bit operating system can naively (even still) run 32 bit applications. I would say at this point most solaris apps are still 32 bit, only the ones that need to be are 64 bit.
The latest release of Solaris (10) is an all 64 bit kernel, but Sun gave 10 years for things to work out. They have released solaris 7, solaris 8 and solaris 9 with 32 and 64 bit kernels.
Microsoft has no 32 bit backwards compatibility for drivers under 64 bit Windows XP. They also “emulate” 32 bit which produces quite a large
performance impact, if the app is not recoded to 64 bit. This means for any app to be usable, the software vendors will need to ship 32 bit and 64 bit versions of the apps.
What I find is that both the Intel and AMD cpus still will run 32 bit code. why not just use the 32 but compatibility in the CPUs, why emulate?
These issues will overall cause the adoption of 64 bit X86 to be very slow.