But on the other hand, 32bit programs will feel absolutely at home in all reverse compatibility modes: they will simply not realize that they are run on a 64bit processor when they take advantage of all the benefits of the new technology, such as on-die chipset North Bridge, and the like. And keeping in mind that during the next few years 32bit will be more than enough for most applications running on PCs, workstations and Low-End servers, Athlon 64 and Opteron will have a definite advantage over Intel Itanium: they are not offering any useless extras for extra money. Need 64bit - no problem. Don’t need 64bit – then let’s use our dear 32bit mode without performing slow emulations.

Actually, the major question is: do we really need such CPUs? I mean CPUs capable of running the standard 32bit code, but using the advantages of 64bit calculations and access to more than 4GB of memory if necessary. Some people think we do. Among them I could mention Tim Sweeny, the developer of Unreal game. He believes that a platform like that will allow building low-cost workstations with much higher price-to-performance ratio than the one of Itanium based systems. By the time Athlon 64 is out, Epic is going to release 64bit Unreal version. Actually, they are very optimistic about the prospects of this approach.

Moreover, the mere possibility to access more registers (those additional eight and eight registers) allows speeding up the rewritten code processing by tens of percents, according to the developers. Add here higher processor performance due to pure technical enhancements with almost zero price growth (unlike Itanium) and you will get an excellent product for its niche.

The first representative of the K8 family has already come out: it is Opteron, a server solution for one-, two- and four-way configurations, with a possibility to build eight-way systems in the future. Unfortunately, not everything is clear yet with its “lite” version, Athlon 64: the CPU launch has been postponed several times already, and now is expected to come some time closer to 2004. You wonder what cause these delays? Well, sometimes they faced some technological problems, or maybe didn’t see real 64bit PC applications (including Windows-64, because Unix is not a PC operation system), which we have already mentioned, and hence decided to wait a little longer. I tend to believe that now it is mostly for the second reason, and AMD is waiting for Microsoft to help it out. Hopefully, this will not happen too late.