Microsoft: 64-bit XP sales in the "millions" within first year
I certainly hope so.
"And performance is what the 64-bit version of XP is all about: Microsoft promises "considerable performance improvements on 64-bit applications." Even if also the earliest 64-bit Athlons will be able to run the new software "well", the company expects that only higher-end users will switch to the new platform. "We see two types of customers who will benefit from 64-bit. On the one side, it will be professionals and workstation users that run into limits with 32-bit today. On the other side there are enthusiasts who want to run the latest software." Marr could not say how many users Microsoft expects to switch within one year, but said "it will be definitely in the millions." He estimated the total intial market for the software at "about six to nine million users"." Read the complete article at: https://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20050218_131847.html
Comments
- Anonymous
February 18, 2005
Ill download it, welcome to reality. - Anonymous
February 18, 2005
I think that if there will be a lot of 64-bit apps optimized for AMD64 that will show significant speed improvment over 32-bit ones people will gladly buy Windows XP x64 Edition. And if there will be games that alos run faster even people at home will think twice before not buying 64-bit edition. Of course it will be easier for them to go for 64-bit edition if there will be Home version and not only Professional. As for me I'm extremely happy even with RC2 and 32-bit apps. It is working great here. Keep up the excellent work! - Anonymous
February 18, 2005
Speaking as someone who has been using 64-bit applications on the Alpha for a decade now, 64-bit has nothing to do with performance except for specific applications that can take advantage of massive VM, like Oracle, rendering farms, and so on. Unless Microsoft deliberately holds the 32-bit version back, I doubt very much that it'll make any difference to most people's systems: a 32-bit version that used the same optimizations would probably be faster still. - Anonymous
February 20, 2005
I had a chance to see how 64-bit apps work in Linux and I must say that in some cases like Mathematica and video audio encoding AMD64 optimized 64-bit apps provide quite a nice performance boost over 32-bit ones. In some cases they are even 20% faster. And video encoding is getting more and more popular these days when more people are starting to buy video cameras. Games can also take advantage of optimizations for their computational demanding parts like physics engines that are also becoming more and more complex in todays games, especialy simulations and also FPS. It would be nice to see something like that in Windows too. - Anonymous
February 26, 2005
It's largely a 'chicken or the egg' scenario. Users won't buy/use XP-x64 until there's an application that makes it necessary. Developers won't develop for it until there's an installed base to sell to.
It'll be interesting to see how this shapes up.