No_Style

Evolution. To take a step up. Going from one thing to another. Well an important step is about to take place in the world of desktop PCs. It's called 64-Bit. All programs, software, games, the stuff we use today is made for 32-Bit. Windows itself is 32-Bit. Back in the day, we moved from 16-Bit to 32-Bit which was in the form of Windows 3.11 and Windows 95. That step enabled us to do wonderous things with our applications and such. Well that time has come again to move up.

64-Bit processing is not only a software or Windows related thing. It's also a hardware thing. All desktop PCs are 32-Bit right now. Apple and AMD will be releasing (or have already released) hybrid CPUs which allow 64-Bit and 32-Bit processing. To fully go 64-Bit requires a lot of time and money. A lot of things have been written/programmed for the 32-bit processor and operating system. Instead of waiting for everything to go 64-Bit. The solution is simple, do something to allow 32-Bit code and 64-Bit code (without performance loss.) AMD is doing this on the hardware side, making a processor which is half 64-bit and half 32-Bit. Apple is doing this on their OS side by updating their current OS X Jaguar to be able to run 32-Bit software efficiently. What about Intel? Either the world's number 1 CPU manufacturer has nothing or being very hush hush about it. Or maybe Intel is waiting for a more appropiate time.

So what are the benefits of all this? I know the many readers of my journal and this section will be wondering. 32-Bit processors can address (or use) up to 4 GB or RAM. 64-Bit processors can address up to 16 exabytes (or 16 Billion Gigabytes) of RAM. Yes, that is a lot of RAM. With 64-Bit processing, larger files can be accessed and with great speed. A lot of servers today already use 64-Bit processing to manage our data. However, we do not support anything over 8 GB of RAM yet in the 64-Bit realm yet. Again, you may be wondering who will benefit from this? Well all you chatters and word processing people won't be seeing a performance increase in this. The everyday user does not use close to 512 MB of RAM. So who will be using 8 GB worth? Video editors. People who make movies like Finding Nemo and such will take great advantage of 64-Bit processing. The ability to do a lot of editing and have the results live off the RAM instead of the Hard Drive (which is about 60 000 times slower) will give artists an awesome advantage. So will it only be the video artists? Nope. Gamers will benefit from this as well. Games will be able to use more and more detail in their characters, worlds and basically everything. Since the RAM limitation is virtually non-existent, programmers can simply do astonishing things with their games. So who else will benefit? That's about it I believe.

So it sounds very dandy doesn't? To some it may not. And I'll point out some problems we'll encounter. This transition to 64-Bit will not be easy.

A lot of rewriting

A lot of drivers and such will have to be rewritten for 64-Bit usage. That is A LOT of drivers. Just think of it, everything from your hard drive, video card, sound card, mother board to your CD-ROM drives will most likely need to be rewritten for full 64-Bit support. Thank goodness for hybrid CPUs! Remember AMD Athlon 64! So that's not a real disadvantage, but it is one major kicker if problems arise between the two different types of code running together. On the brighter side of things, new hardware will be made for 64-Bit.

Windows XP lags behind

Another disadvantage is the new Windows XP 64-Bit. It will be missing a lot of features the 32-Bit one has. Here is a small sample list of what will be missing in the new Windows XP 64-Bit.

Digital video disc (DVD) video playback
CD Recording
Kodak Imaging Accessory
Windows Media Player
A subset of Windows Media Technologies
DirectMusic®
Microsoft TV Technologies for Windows®
Video mixing renderer (VMR)
NetMeeting®
IEEE 1394 audio
Fax

Source: Features Not Supported In Windows XP 64-Bit Edition

So it doesn't come with a lot of things like DVD playback, but maybe third party developers will be caught up by then and release programs to do just that.

Expense

8 GB of RAM is expensive. It doesn't matter how RAM prices are right now, RAM is generally expensive if you want volume AND speed. What is worse, is the fact you probably have to buy 1 GB sticks (for 4 GB) of it, or 2 GB (for 8 GB) sticks when they hit the market. Why? Because motherboards will not have 8 DIMMs (slots) for you to stick the RAM into. The Mobo coming for Apple will have 8 DIMMs I believe, but for the AMD side of things: there will only be 4 DIMMs.
Intel's possible stance on this 64-Bit Desktop could be this reason as well: it will cost a lot of money to make a 64-Bit processor for desktop and it's probably better off to take chances for now and stick to what the majority of the people want.


So overall, a lot of things appear nice on paper, but for practical average joe use it is not a great thing. Like I mentioned before, the everyday user doesn't even use up to 512 MB of RAM. It will be awhile before the day to day user will bask in the glory of 64-Bit. So all in all, there will be a small segment of the market that will be interested in this evolutionary step. Am I excited? Not really. I'm more of a bystander in this. I'm just going to sit back and see what will roll out. In the coming months, with the coming of Apple's G5 and AMD Athlon64, there will be a lot of advertisement promoting the need to move onto 64-bit bandwagon. We all will have to move 64-Bit one day. But that day could be 2-3 years from now when all the dust has settled.

Here are 2 links to real nice articles concerning this topic.

X-Bit Labs: CPUs with 64bit Architecture: Evolution or Revolution?
PC World: Are You Ready for a 64-Bit PC?


This was written for my journal thing. But I decided to post it here. I think I've got all the facts, but I'm only human so if there are errors, please note them

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Andrew275

Whoa, it looks like there's a lot of important stuff Windows XP 64-bit doesn't support. I wonder why they're leaving out so much; I don't think I could use it if it was missing all the stuff listed on that page. Not having WMP, IrDA, PC Card, power management, and Windows Installer is a pretty big deal IMO.