At its April event in San Francisco, Microsoft will roll out specifically for Itanium two high-end versions of its Windows Server 2003 operating system, it first server OS update in three years. The 32-bit versions of Windows Server 2003 will run on all x86 processors including AMD's Opteron which has both 32- and 64-bit modes.

A Microsoft executive would only say that a version supporting Opteron's 64-bit capabilities will come sometime after that launch and before the next major release of the OS code-named Black Home. "We haven't been able to settle on what that 64-bit Operton OS product will look like, what the schedule will be or how we will announce it yet," said Bob O'Brien, group product manager for Microsoft's Windows Server division.

O'Brien said he expects Microsoft ultimately will support the 64-bit Opteron features in a manner similar to how it first supported Itanium, with an interim release product specific to that CPU. One observer said that product could come later this year or in 2004.

An AMD spokesman said the company only expected Opteron would have 32-bit support in Windows Server 2003, with 64-bit support following sometime later. SuSE Linux AG (Nuremberg, Germany) expects to launch a 64-bit distribution of Linux at or before the Operton launch next month. Red Hat (Raleigh, N.C.) has said it also will provide a 64-bit distribution of Linux for Opteron but has not given a date for its release.

Minimal impact

AMD announced last spring Microsoft would support the 64-bit capabilities of Opteron. The software developer has had prototype Opteron hardware in its labs to develop that code for more than a year, but the work is not at a level where the company can commit to a ship date yet, O'Brien said.

"I think this will have minimal impact on AMD," said Nathan Brookwood, market watcher with Insight64 (Saratoga, Calif.). "Opteron really is being positioned by AMD as a future-proof version of a 32-bit CPU," with initial sales focused on 32-bit software and a capability to upgrade to 64-bits later, he added.

Conversely, Itanium has relatively poor 32-bit performance and thus depends on 64-bit software support, Brookwood added.

The lag for AMD 64-bit support is not surprising, Brookwood said, because the Itanium is now in its second iteration. Hence, Microsoft has had time to develop code and align it with its major release schedules. First generation Opteron processors, however, have only been available in prototype form about a year, he said.

Windows Server 2003 marks the first time Microsoft has a version of its OS for Itanium in a broad release for end users and OEMs. The OS also marks a new high watermark for Windows in big back-end computers. High-end versions of the OS will be the first to support clusters of as many as eight systems each supporting as much as 64 Gbytes RAM and 32 CPUs in a symmetric multiprocessing architecture.