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To: Scumbria who wrote (105571)	7/13/2000 2:29:57 AM
From: semiconeng	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Scumbria: microsoft.com Seems to me like Windows 2000 runs on IA-64 SemiconEng

To: Scumbria who wrote (105571)	7/13/2000 12:59:27 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 186894

Scumbria, <I thought that Itanium is supposed to provide full IA-32 compatibility in hardware.> It is, but that applies to 32-bit applications, not operating systems. IA-64 isn't able to just run shrink-wrapped IA-32 operating systems right out of the box. The interrupt structure is slightly different; the PAL and SAL (Processor and System Abstraction Layers) need to be specifically geared for IA-64; the kernel code needs to recognize some of the unique IA-64 processor features; and so on. But within the context of the IA-64 OS, 32-bit applications can be run without recompilation or emulation. Tenchusatsu

To: Scumbria who wrote (105571)	7/13/2000 1:09:56 PM
From: Adam Nash	Respond to of 186894

The Itanium does provide full IA-32 compatibility in hardware. However, that doesn't mean that IA-32 code will somehow get magical access to a 64-bit address space. That's the operating system's job, and in order to implement it the operating system will have to contain IA-64 instructions. Thus, Microsoft could have included that functionality in the straight Windows 2000. However, that would have greatly increased the complexity of the product and likely delayed it even further. My point was that no one cares if the OS version is different, as long as it can run all Win32 applications properly and with reasonable speed. If I were you, I'd worry more about the latter, as the IA-32 benchmark speeds are increasing much faster than expected, and IA-64 is rolling out slower than expected.