Replies to post #10029 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[I_banker]

wbmw, porting drivers will occur in the same manner as any new technology uptake occurs. The manufacturer, in this case microsoft, will offer a basic set of drivers. This will be followed shortly by drivers offered by companies who cater to the enthusiast crowd (i.e. creative labs, nvidia, ati, etc.) as they compete for the high end dollars (e.g. $500 graphics cards, $200 sound cards). Slowly but surely other manufacturers will want to play in the rich sand box and within a year or two the driver set will be essentially complete.

Now I am not saying that every device will have drivers, in fact, most older devices probably will not. However, I think that all new devices will offer drivers, in the same way as they are offered for Macs or Linux PCs.

[Not a Short]

agreed on the driver issue but your statement spoke of compatability not support.

Besides do you deny that W2K is supported by the hardware industry at this point?

Also do I have to remind you yet again that you can run W2K instead of or in addition to a 64 bit OS if you need the support that is already in place for legacy devices?

[jhalada]

wbmw,

Good about drivers, and situation being similar to Windows 2000, but as you probably know from Windows 2000 transition, Microsoft provided a number of generic drivers for number of common devices, which covered a lot of territory. Eventually, manufacturers delivered their custom implementations.

But going with Windows 64 means that you have to be willing to make some compromises about the devices you can use, at least initially.

Joe

[Dan3]

Re: who's going to port the 1000s of Windows drivers to 64-bit so that people can run Windows 64 on their desktop?

For Opteron/Athlon-64, with millions of new users expected in the next few quarters, everyone - especially since it's so easy to port to this wonderfully compatible architecture.

For the few thousand buyers of Itanium and its weird new platform, very few. You've done a fine job of pointing out why Itanium can't seem to get anywhere.

As mentioned previously, 32-bit apps run under the 64-bit version of Windows without translation or emulation. The only “help” such applications receive is that 32-bit system service calls are “thunked” (extended) to their 64-bit equivalents. This is entirely transparent to the application.

And The Drivers?

For most drivers, moving to the AMD-64 is trivial. Here at OSR we’ve already ported several drivers to support AMD-64. All that’s required will be a careful read-through of the code to ensure 64-bit compliance (discussed below) and re-compiling using the 64-bit compiler provided as part of the DDK.

An interesting fact to note is that the AMD-64 uses the “longlong pointer” architecture model. This means that while pointers become 64-bit values (with a data type of ULONGLONG), the ULONG data type stays 32-bits. This significantly eases the process of moving your driver to the AMD-64. Note that this is different from some Unix systems, where when moving from a 32-bit to a 64-bit system the LONG data type becomes 64-bits long.
http://www.osronline.com/article.cfm?id=243