AMD is showing off a prototype 64-bit Windows OS running on its upcoming 64-bit Opteron processors. OK, so it"s jam tomorrow, but the fact that AMD is showing this in public means that tomorrow is not too far away.
The demo units can be seen in action at Comdex Fall, Las Vegas which opens for business today, and at Supercomputing 2002, which also kicks off in Baltimore today.
The Comdex boxes have an ancient Egyptian flavour - they come from Texas start-up Newisys (pronounced New Isis), which is building a business around AMD Opteron servers, branded Khepri "after the Egyptian god associated with the sunrise, the one represented by a man with a scarab"s head".
The demo units are running Information Server (IIS), 64-bit Terminal Services and 64-bit Microsoft Internet Explorer. Also they"re running 32-bit Office XP over the ProtoWin-64 - the demo shows interoperability between the 32-bit and 64-bit apps, AMD says.
At Supercomputing 2002, AMD is showing a 4-way Opteron box running ProtoWin-64 and 32-bit Fluent 6.0 computational fluid dynamics software.