Winsupersite has a super cite from Brian Valentine, the Senior Vice President of Microsoft's Windows Division. In a discussion of Longhorn, the next version of Windows NT/XP/2000, he reveals that it intends to support Intel's Titanic, AMD's Opteron, plus one to three other high volume 64 bit CPUs.
We're somewhat at a loss as to what these "high volume 64 bit platforms" could be. Microsoft is obviously at pains, to distance itself from the early-90s Windows support for MIPS and PowerPC, now almost forgotten except by the few poor souls who actually used it before it was discontinued, or, God forbid, even based their IT strategy on it.
Indeed, even the more recent Alpha support is unlikely to provide a model for MS's newfound love of hardware diversity.
After dragging the Alpha version along half-heartedly for years, never quite managing to get the entire Office suite ported, it dropped it after a spat with DECpaq about who should be paying.
The statement appears to represent quite an about-face from the company that once told AMD, Cyrix and Rise: Agree on a multimedia instruction set (3DNow!) or face a boycott from the 500lb übervole of software.
News source: The Inquirer
