SOURCES WHO HAVE seen the latest revision of Longhorn – Microsoft"s cunning new interface/operating system for PCs which is supposed to be ready by Q4 next year, say it will have extensive support for the AMD 64 (Hammer) family of CPUs. The Longhorn release is build 3683, while the version of Windows will be 5.1, following in a long train of release numbers such as NT 3.0, NT 3.1, 3.51, 4.0 and so on. Perhaps MS hopes that the .1 at the end will make Longhorn as much of a success as Windows 3.1 was.
Not that Longhorn won"t support IA64 (Itanium) microprocessors from Intel, though. According to the source who is close to Microsoft"s plans, both 64-bit CPUs will be supported when the product is released.
The references to AMD-64 are in NTLDR, a file that the patient will have noticed appears when there is an NT-based system boot.
The news is not entirely unexpected. AMD will have to have Microsoft Longhorn support for its Hammer microprocessors – the PC industry in general is pinning a lot on this release. Whether it will be the groundbreaking operating system that will make everyone go out and buy new PCs in droves is a different matter – it is supposed to have PCI Express support that will give graphics vendors, for example, much faster capabilities.