I am very excited about the next Microsoft server operating system (Server 2008 R2). Microsoft has pushed that the next server platform will only be in 64-bit. What does this means? Faster software will not interface faster hardware, to overall make a system faster than anything we’ve seen. Accessing a server will output faster processing requests. Which means SQL processing, file sharing, system services, websites, email, will all be faster. What this means to everyone? The ripple effect will start when this becomes widely used.

We’ve needed a push like this a long time ago, but the hardware wasn’t there to support the software. But now the hardware can fully take advantage of the software and the time for it is now. Intel’s recently made a new mandate with their hardware the new i7 processor line only supports triple channel memory and a minimum Front Side Bus (FSB) of 1066MHz. This mandate increases the possible maximum memory allocation to be up to 128GB! Right now you can only purchase a 2GB memory stick so for most desktop computers you can have up to 12GB of ram. The bottleneck you have with 32-bit operating systems is even if you had 12GB of ram; the operating system will only use up to 3GB of the ram because of the hardware’s limited technology of 32-bit. But if you go with a 64-bit operating system you can use up to 128GB of ram. One of the problems with the 64-bit platform is getting developers to create their software for it. But now the push to 64-bit is here it shall push them to develop in both if not just 64-bit.

That is the next mandate that Microsoft needs to push is the operating system platform be 64-bit. Microsoft is not doing this with Windows 7 but hopefully with Windows 8 the 64-bit demand will be the only platform going forward.

– Harry Caskey

Check out the article here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/r2.aspx