By Charles Congdon & Erik A. Niemeyer, Sr. Software Engineers, Intel Corporation

The move to 64-bit computing is here. Major hardware vendor have recently added to their offerings based on Intel® Itanium® architecture Why you ask? Because users are demanding the performance, value, and scalability that 64-bit platforms can provide. 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. The expense of proprietary RISC implementations that support 64-bit has limited their deployment, and these 64-bit solutions have suffered from the drawback that 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 represents 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 extend the IA-32 architecture to allow the execution of 64-bit applications, and make use of a true 64-bit memory address space.

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 volume will discuss many of the issues you may face when preparing to port your application to a 64-bit operating system running on Intel Itanium processors or Intel 64 architecture-based platforms.

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