By Erik A. Niemeyer, Sr. Software Engineer, Intel Corporation and Charles Congdon, Sr. Software Engineer, Intel Corporation

The move to 64-bit computing is here. Many major hardware vendors have recently added to their offerings based on Intel® Itanium® architecture. Why, you may ask? Because users are demanding the performance, value, and scalability that 64-bit platforms can provide and IT managers are actively migrating their enterprise applications to 64-bit platforms based on Intel® architecture.

The constraints of 32-bit applications, particularly the 4GB virtual memory ceiling, have forced companies to consider migration to larger-scale servers supporting 64-bit virtual memory addressing. Most legacy 64-bit systems have traditionally been viewed as ungainly and expensive because of historical experiences with RISC* implementations. Also, these 64-bit solutions suffered from a key drawback; they usually required the use of a proprietary operating system that was available for no other hardware platform.

Intel has addressed inherent limitations of 32-bit computing by making 64-bit computing available on the vast majority of its desktop and all of its server and workstation products:

• The Intel® Itanium® processor family - representing the best-of-breed 64-bit platform with superior reliability, performance, parallelism, and scalability.
• The Intel® Xeon®, Intel® Pentium®, Intel® Celeron®, and Intel® Core™ microarchitecture processors with Intel® 64 architecture – extending the memory addressing capabilities of the IA-32 architecture.

Intel has worked with the OS providers to make the installation, use, administration and support of these systems as much like their 32-bit counterparts as possible. This enables 64-bit systems running the most popular operating systems of today - including Windows* and Linux* - to integrate almost seamlessly into customers networks.

This paper was written to help you take advantage of this sweeping change in technology and will go into detail on how to assess the potential benefits. In addition, parts 2 & 3 of this series will cover the processes, challenges, and potential gains of porting to a 64-bit Intel platform.

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