The Hindu : AMD eases the cultural shock of 64-bit computing

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, May 03, 2003

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AMD eases the cultural shock of 64-bit computing

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE MAY 2. This week's launch of its new 64-bit Opteron processor in India may be a canny move by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) to address the worry of the owners of current PCs and servers — overwhelmingly based on 32-bit chips — how to make a painless transition to 64-bit systems. At today's unveiling here of the new AMD range, engineers underlined the compelling USP: users could still seamlessly run all their current 32-bit applications on the 64-bit Opterons; but the extra 32 bits would supercharge their machines as and when they choose to move into the new 64-bit regime. The argument for moving to a new era where computers gobbled data in gulps of 64 bits rather than 32 bits at a time, was evident: the most memory that a machine could address with a 32 bit address was 2 raised to the power of 32 — in practice something below 4 gigabytes. But widen the "byte'' or computer word to 64 bits and the potential memory capacity vastly increased (to be exact, 2 to the power 64). Independent observers say the change is overdue.

Prof. S. Sadagopan, Director of the Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), told The Hindu that in the enterprise arena, IT Managers were already "hitting the ceiling'' of 32-bit computing. IIIT would be shortly opening the country's first Opteron Lab where software applications harnessing the chip's 64-bit capability would be developed.

Sanjeev Keskar, AMD Far East's Country Manager, announced that three 64-bit Opterons (240, 242 and 244) had already been launched in India this week. All three were dual processors. This would be shortly followed by Opteron 100 series and Opteron 800 which could be used in 8-way servers.

AMD's roadmap also includes the September 2003 launch of a 64-bit processor for the mass consumer desktop and mobile PC market — the Athlon 64.

This would be the first industry offering of a 64-bit device for the home and small office market. The big initial application wave expected to ride on this chip was the huge multimedia-rich games market, felt Arvind Chandrasekhar, AMD's Technical Specialist (India and SAARC).

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