Longhorn, 64-Bit Promoted at WinHEC

Focusing almost exclusively on 64-bit computing and the next Windows client release, code-named Longhorn, Microsoft’s Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) 2005 painted a rosy future for hardware vendors, even if some of the dates for that future remain uncertain. The conference also marked the debut of a new document exchange format, a logo program for Longhorn-compatible PCs, and a contest for innovative computer designs.

The 64-Bit Opportunity

WinHEC 2005 coincided with the release of new versions of Windows for clients and servers that use x64 chips. Designed by AMD and subsequently adopted by Intel, this alternative to Intel’s Itanium 64-bit chips offers better 32-bit software performance and already outsells Itanium even though no 64-bit version of Windows was available for x64 chips until now.

Launched without fanfare on the first day of WinHEC 2005, the x64 versions of Windows promise extraordinary performance gains, said Gates, who called 64-bit systems “the biggest thing happening in the computing space.” The main benefit of 64-bit systems is their ability to access an almost limitless amount of memory. (The 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition supports up to 1 terabyte, or 1024GB, of physical memory, compared with the 64GB maximum for Windows Datacenter 32-bit versions.) This increase in memory significantly reduces the amount of time some large applications (such as SQL Server) spend retrieving data from disk and allows data retrieval to be several orders of magnitude faster than with 32-bit systems, which are normally limited to 4GB of memory and must swap data between memory and the disk.