14 DAY TRIAL // Speaking at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Jim Allchin, group vice president of Microsoft's Platforms Group, confirmed on Tuesday that the 64-bit edition of Windows XP Professional will ship "within four weeks".
"We're locked on to 64-bit," Allchin said, encouraging developers to start operating necessary changes to their applications to include the ability to take advantage of the extra processing power. According to earlier statements made by Microsoft with the switch from 32-bit to 64-bit computing, users "can expect considerable performance improvements across a variety of workloads" when moving from 32-bit Windows to 64-bit.
"Some 32-bit applications could gain as much as 30 percent speed under the new operating system but Microsoft generally expects generally "five percent more or less performance with 32-bit applications", said Allchin.
In spite of mixed messages in the past, the Redmond giant will continue to support the Intel Itanium line of processors with 64-bit Windows versions.
The Microsoft representative admitted that the 64-bit desktop Windows came down a long road, but Microsoft now intends to follow Intel's call to quickly transition servers, workstations and desktops to 64-bit: "Its time. Get your code ready and convert your apps now," he told the developer attendees.
But the long wait hasn't been for the Intel crowd, which only recently launched chips running 64-bit tasks.
The 64-bit versions of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 have been a long time coming, especially for chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices, which has offered such chips for roughly two years in the server market and 18 months in the desktop PC market.