This is the question on everyone’s lips at the moment. There has been some differing reports on it floating around the internet, it’s hard to tell who is right until an official statement is made. And I bet it’s a hot topic in many of the meetings that will be attending right now. This previous post talks about why should we bother moving to x64 right now? And it’s true; there is no main driver in migrating to x64 for the everydayWindows user just now. In fact it’s just a headache with some applications not being supported. And while Microsoft continue to support x86, it will continue to be the same. In fact, the only reason people would feel compelled to jump to x64 just now would be a specific application requiring more than 4GB of memory space……how many applications are going to boast to being that hungry for memory?
And what’s going to change in the next 4/5 years, while we wait for Windows 7? Not a lot I suspect. There may be the odd game that comes along to force the hardcore gamers over. But general day to day tasks will happily tick over on x86. And while the x86 is alive the corporates will continue to build their systems on this platform. And at the end of the day it’s the corporates that force the hand of Microsoft every time. The same way they continued NT4 support year after year after year. Every year they would tell the corporates to migrate, and even today 11 years after its release, there are still some massive companies using NT4.
I expect the same to happen with Windows 7. Microsoft deep down would maybe hope to wean the big businesses and consumers off x86 through free choice. A good example of this is a presentation made by Microsoft entitled ”Windows Client 64-Bit Roadmap and Business Opportunities“. A screenshot of one slide specifically is below:
As you can see, Microsoft anticipated “x64 becoming default OS” and “mainstream x64 adoption for both business and consumer” during 2006 with the release of Vista. This certainly isn’t the case and certainly won’t be the case in the coming years.
So Microsoft will be mulling this over again….back to the drawing board. Do we make Windows 7 x86 compatible or draw the line in the sand?
I think you can bet your bottom dollar that Microsoft has this exact conversation with the banking establishments and in the end x86Windows 7 hit’s the shelf in the coming years.
The great x64/x86 debate is quite comparable to the TCP/IP v4/v6 one. TCP/IP v6 might offer great scalability, greater this and great that. But at the end of the day it’s going to both cost a lot of people a lot of time and money to adopt it for what would seem negligible benefits on the most part. On the other side of the coin you can see why Exchange 2007 benefits from x64 architecture, it’s a resource hungry application, but until we see those kind of stakes on the desktop, don’t expect to be using those x64 instructions on your processor anytime soon….if at all.
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