Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[jhalada]

bobs,

I think the situation with gamers will be that once one or more of the popular games will come out with 64 bit clients that perform measurably faster, the gamers will move to 64 bit. I think Christmas 2005 will be the time.

On the general consumer end of things, I think the apps where 64 bit will make significan impact are media applications (encoding, encrypting etc). I know that when I was converting some DVDs I bought in Europe from PAL to NTSC, it took some 12 hours (2 or 3 times, until I got all the parameters right).

On the corporate side of things, I think the most important release will be SQL Server 2005 64 bit (Q2) on the server end. The performance benefit will be substantial, to the point that any new installation of anything but the lowest end server will be crazy without 64 bit Windows (with either 32 bit database or, even better, 64 bit database).

Microsoft is also bringing out a new product - Windows version dedicated to HPC. I think (I may be wrong on this) that this version will be 64 bit only. Microsoft is starting in this business basically from zero, but that is where Microsoft started in just about every business segment.

Joe