Guild Companies

A little less than a year ago, Advanced Micro Devices and Intel both named their then-future Opteron and Itanium 2 64-bit processors and said that operating system maker Microsoft would have server and workstation versions of Windows available for these chips. Microsoft has since then said it will ship Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 for Itanium 2 machines, but has been quiet about plans for the "SledgeHammer" Opteron and its desktop variant in the AMD "Hammer" family of chips, the "ClawHammer" Athlon 64.

Last week, Microsoft finally gave some indication of its plans. While the company has been shipping a developmental release of Windows (probably based on Windows 2000) and an application toolkit for application software providers that lets them develop for Itanium or Opteron/Athlon 64 chips since last November, that's not the same thing as having a full-blown operating system to play with. Windows Server 2003, code-named "Whistler" by Microsoft, has been available in beta for over a year on Intel chips and was also available in the Release Candidate 1 and Release Candidate 2 phases of rollout late last year and early this year. At the end of March, when Microsoft released Whistler to manufacturing, 64-bit variants of Whistler for servers were included. Itanium support is, at this point, a done deal. Up until now, Itanium support on Itanium servers has been restricted to Advanced Server Limited Edition, a 64-bit variant of Windows 2000 that was necessitated by the delays in bringing Whistler to market in 2002 because of security concerns.

Microsoft's plans are still a little vague, and AMD is probably not entirely happy with Microsoft not actually being ready with finished versions of Whistler for the Opteron processors. AMD will roll out the Opterons on April 22, and Microsoft rolls out Whistler on April 24. Clearly, the timing was right even if the Microsoft code isn't ready. Microsoft is pretty far away from having finished code ready for the AMD 64-bit chips. Whether Microsoft is stalling or there are technical issues that are delaying Opteron and Athlon 64 support is not clear. AMD has had to delay the roll out of its 64-bit Athlon 64 and Opteron chips, so it might be more AMD's fault than Microsoft's. Intel can't be very happy about AMD support of a 64-bit memory architecture and instruction set that is incompatible with its Itanium chips, but if AMD didn't exist, Intel would have to invent it to keep the antitrust lawyers from the United States and Europe from giving it grief. A certain amount of success by AMD means that Intel can keep its chip monopoly on the desktop and possibly extend its reach in the server and workstation market as it eats share from the RISC/Unix suppliers.

Microsoft says it will have a beta version of Windows XP ready for the Athlon 64 version of the Hammer chip for desktop and laptop computers ready by mid-2003, and that it will also have a beta version of Windows Server 2003 ready in mid-2003, too, for the Opteron server chips. It seems clear the desktop platform is setting the pace for development on the AMD 64-bit platform, and with AMD expected to roll out the Athlon 64 in September, it may mean server versions of Windows operating systems are not available until that late stage in the game.

It is unclear which editions of Whistler Microsoft will ship on the AMD Opteron, but it seems likely that Windows Server 2000 Standard Edition (spanning two-way and four-way machines with up to 4 GB of main memory) and Enterprise Edition (spanning four-way and eight-way machines with up to 32 GB of main memory) will probably be sufficient. Unless AMD and its partners deliver machines that scale beyond eight-way SMP this year, creating a Datacenter Edition is a waste of time. And considering that AMD is getting most of its traction supporting Windows and Linux in supercomputing and database workloads, the Web Edition of Whistler is probably not something Microsoft wants to waste a lot of time on until it sees demand. Microsoft has not said anything about when its database, middleware, and applications will be available for the Hammer platforms, and frankly, without applications, the Windows support is interesting but not particularly useful. Other ISVs that compete with Microsoft can't roll out their products until Windows is out the door, so Microsoft is largely controlling the speed at which AMD's Hammer chips will be taken up by the market.

Everyone is assuming that Microsoft will price the AMD and Intel versions of the Windows platform identically, but I would not be at all surprised if Microsoft charges a premium for AMD products and support because of the difference in volume on the chips.

While AMD will get Microsoft operating system support later than Intel for its most recent 64-bit platforms, it will have one advantage: the AMD versions of the Windows platform will support 32-bit and 64-but compiled applications side by side. On the Itanium chip, 32-bit applications run in a pseudo-emulated mode and all applications have to be recompiled to take advantage of the 64-bit memory and new Itanium instructions to see big performance improvements. We won't know how much of a benefit--if any--this comes to in the real world until the end of this year, when Windows-on-AMD (Windamd?) platforms are in the field and being stress tested.

If any companies are happy about all this, they are the commercial Linux distributors Red Hat, SuSE, Turbolinux, and SCO Group, which have all committed to supporting the 64-bit AMD chips. The question now, of course, is whether or not they will be ready to roll on April 22. (I guess we could call these guys Linamd platforms, in keeping with the Lintel nickname.)