Dettagli su Ms Windows e cpu AMD a 64 bit

Un documento relativo alle caratteristiche dei prossimi sistemi operativi dedicati a processori a 64 bit, è stato diffuso nel web da ignote fonti ed il "mitico" sito The Inquirer ovviamente non ha perso l'occasione ed ha amplificato la gaffe di Microsoft, svelando qualche dettaglio.

Dal documento in formato word si apprendono alcuni particolari relativi all'utilizzo delle cpu di prossima generazione di casa AMD, ci riferiamo ad Athlon 64 ma il discorso è valido anche per Opteron (già disponibile).

I nuovo OS potranno indirizzare fino a 16 terabytes di memoria ram, garantendo prestazioni più elevate (il ricorso allo swap su disco sarà notevolmente ridotto!) ed uno sfruttamento ottimale dell'hardware.

Riportiamo qui di seguito alcuni passi dell'introduzione ed inviatiamo i più interessati alle architetture a 64 bit a leggere il documento completo attualmente disponibile qui.

Introducing 64-bit Windows
A 64-bit operating system supports far more physical memory than a 32-bit operating system. For example, 32-bit Windows NT® supports 4 gigabytes of memory, while 64-bit Windows supports 16 terabytes of memory. The increased physical memory includes the following benefits for applications:

Each application can support more users. All or part of each application must be replicated for each user, which requires additional memory.
Each application has better performance. Increased physical memory allows more applications to run simultaneously and remain completely resident in the system's main memory. This reduces or eliminates the performance penalty of swapping pages to and from disk.
Each application has more memory for data storage and manipulation. Databases can store more of their data in the physical memory of the system. Data access is faster because disk reads are not necessary.
Applications can manipulate large amounts of data easily and more reliably. Video composition for motion picture work requires 64-bit Windows for this reason. Modeling for scientific and financial applications benefits greatly from memory-resident data structures that are not possible to create on 32-bit Windows®.

Additionally, 64-bit Windows for AMD64 offers other benefits:

Existing 32-bit applications run at full-speed in WoW64. WoW64 is Windows on Windows 64-Bit, a 32-Bit Windows compatibility environment on top of 64-Bit Windows.
64-bit applications and 32-bit applications may be run side-by-side, at full-speed, on the same machine. Thus, the software investment in 32-bit applications is protected while enabling an incremental transition to 64-bit computing based on benefits to individual applications.