When will the successor of WinXP be released?! Will this be "Windows 64"?!..

[Dance123]

Hi,

Does anybody know when the successor of WinXP for desktop PC's will be released to the public?! Will this be "Windows 64" or something?! If you buy an Athlon 64 today, can applications already take advantage of this or will Athlon 64 only be usefull once Microsoft releases Windows 64, which I suppose is 64 bit or something?! Will this be a big step forward by the way in performance?!

Thanks for all good info!

 

[hopejr]

There's a beta for Windows XP 64-bit for AMD64 at the moment (already one for itanium). The real successor for XP is Longhorn. It's supposed to come out mid-2006 (beta out later this year apparently).

 

[Dance123]

Thanks for the info. Does that mean that for now Athlon 64's 64-bit support isn't any usefull or can certain applications already make use of that?!

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Dance123
Thanks for the info. Does that mean that for now Athlon 64's 64-bit support isn't any usefull or can certain applications already make use of that?!

Not without a 64bit OS.
It's plenty fast in 32bit mode though, so don't feel bad about buying one

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: hopejr
There's a beta for Windows XP 64-bit for AMD64 at the moment (already one for itanium). The real successor for XP is Longhorn. It's supposed to come out mid-2006 (beta out later this year apparently).

Support for Itanium has been cancelled.

 

[imported_bum]

Intel is getting closer to releasing their 64 bit chips and my guess is XP 64 is released almost immediately after that. Not sure how much performance gain normal users will see, but I'm certainly going to try to it when driver support/etc is sufficient.

 

[spyordie007]

Not sure how much performance gain normal users will see

Right now, probably not very much. Give it a few years though and there will start to be desktop apps that have high enough requirements that it would be adventagous to run them on a 64 bit platform.