The best thing that can be said about the demand for 64-bit computing on the desktop is that it is indeterminate. While horsepower-hungry users may see it as a necessity, most IT departments are not yet concerned with giving desktop clients a massive amount of addressable RAM. So it will be no surprise if the 64-bit edition of Windows XP -- saddled with the ungainly name "Windows XP 64-bit Edition for 64-bit Extended Systems" and developed for AMD"s Athlon64 chip -- is greeted with a few yawns and shakes of the head when it debuts in the first half of 2004.
After all, for clients to get any boost from 64-bit, they will need 64-bit applications, and those are farther out on the horizon. Stranger things have happened in computing, but it appears that there will be something less than a stampede greeting XP 64-bit when it comes off the assembly line. However, three years from now, there may be a different story.