X64 Version of Windows Server 2003 on Tap from Microsoft

by Alex Woodie

The long wait for a marketable 64-bit server operating system from Microsoft is almost over. Next week at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Seattle, Microsoft is expected to officially announced the immediate availability of Windows Server 2003 X64 Editions, the business-oriented version of Microsoft's server OS that runs on the extended 64-bit processors now shipping from AMD and Intel.

Since Microsoft got the security-focused Windows XP Service Pack 2 out the door last summer, the OS development team in Redmond has worked on other high-priority items, including Windows Server 2003 SP1, and the X64 editions of both Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP Professional. While the X64 release of XP Pro is nice, it's the release of Windows Server 2003 X64 Edition that's expected to have a real impact on the market for business applications.

For years, we've been told that Windows will eventually be 64-bit, and that it will then address larger amounts of memory and run the big business applications just as well as the mature 64-bit operating systems fromHewlett-Packard, IBM, and Sun Microsystems have been doing for years.

Microsoft did (sort of) deliver on that promise several years back with versions of Windows designed for the 64-bit Itanium processors that Intel and HP developed together. However, the Itanium market never fully developed, and may never fulfill original expectations, for various reasons, not the least of which is that Itanium was several years late to market, and offered benefits of dubious value compared to 64-bit Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) processors and their associated Unix and OS/400 operating systems. Developing compilers for Itanium's Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC) architecture is also a much different process than developers are used to with the X86 platform, which has further marginalized Itanium away from Microsoft's "market to the masses" approach and to the fringes of high-end and scientific computing.

X64 can change that. AMD started shipping 64-bit Opteron processors, which have their own 64-bit memory extensions for the 32-bit X86 architecture, in early 2003, while it took Intel almost a year to catch up with its Xeon DP processor for two-way servers and more than two years to draw alongside with its Xeon MP processors for four-way and larger server. (Each chip vendor has its own name for the 64-bit memory extensions--X86-64 for AMD and EM64T for Intel--but I like the term "X64," which Microsoft and others in the industry are using.) While various Linux operating systems have supported X64 processors for some time, we are really just at the start of the X64 movement, and with Windows joining the crowd, it's going to get interesting.

In advance of the launch ceremony for Windows Server 2003 X64 Edition at WinHEC next week, Microsoft has been trying to drum up interest in 64-bit computing. Last week the company posted a Q&A with Windows server chief Bob Muglia and Intel's senior VP Abhi Talwalkar, in which Muglia and Talwalkar discuss X64 computing. In that interview, Muglia said even regular 32-bit apps will run better under the X64 version of Windows (we hear about 10 to 15 percent faster), even if they haven't been redeveloped for 64-bits.

"We've seen that 32-bit applications on the X64 versions of Windows Server 2003 show equal or better performance than running on 32-bit Windows Server 2003," Muglia says. "The extended memory 64-bit architecture allows customers to move to pure 64-bit applications at their own pace while still experiencing an improvement in performance. [But] the real performance gains come from running 64-bit applications on Windows Server 2003 X64 editions."

We'll have to wait for the 64-bit capabilities in Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 before we start seeing 64-bit Windows applications having a big impact in the market. Just the same, the launch of Windows Server 2003 X64 Edition is a big deal, which is why the IT Jungle will be at WinHEC 2005 to cover it.