OEMs to Ship Prerelease 64-bit Windows

After a series of delays that added years to the original schedule, Intel is finally providing 64-bit Itanium processors to OEMs so that they can ship high-end workstations and servers in the next several months. The real impact of the 64-bit processors (code-named Merced) will not be felt until there are applications that support Intel’s 64-bit architecture, such as 64-bit versions of Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange, and until Intel releases the second, more powerful version of the processor (code-named McKinley) next year. In the meantime, the majority of Itanium systems will go to developers who need to migrate applications to the new processor architecture and corporations that want to begin evaluating the systems for computing-intensive applications.

While Dell, Hewlett Packard (HP), and IBM have publicly released details of their first Itanium-based workstations and servers, and Intel expects that 25 OEMs will offer more than 35 Itanium-based models this year, operating system vendors are scrambling to complete testing of their operating systems for the Itanium. Microsoft will allow OEMs to ship workstations with a “limited” prerelease professional desktop and server version of 64-bit Whistler (code-name for the next version of Windows 2000). These prerelease versions are “limited” because Microsoft will support them only until the availability of the “golden,” or “released-to-manufacturing,” version of 64-bit Windows XP in Oct. 2001 and 64-bit Whistler Advanced Server in 2002, at which time customers will have to upgrade to these releases.