Microsoft Corp.'s officials expressed at Intel Developer Forum the company's strong intention to release its long-awaited operating system for computers based on the so-called x86-64 chips that can execute 32-bit and 64-bit code natively in April. "We are locked on 64-bit...You should start [tailoring] your applications to 64-bit in a native way," said Jim Allchin, Microsoft's senior vice president of platforms, trying to popularize the idea of creating software that takes advantage of 64-bit processing among software developers.
According to the exec of Microsoft, the company aims to ship desktop/workstation version of Windows XP Professional x64 in early April, 2005, with x86-64 flavour of Windows Server 2003 leaving the building in Redmond, Washington in late April, 2005. While the world's top software maker is not usually accurate with release dates for its upcoming products, the statement concerning 64-bit desktop and server OS gives some backing to Intel's recently announced desktop chips that support 64-bit capability. Besides that Microsoft's representative also applauded Intel's forthcoming innovations – multi-core processors as well as virtualization technology.
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News source: Xbit Labs
