Digital Home Thoughts: Windows XP 64-bit Coming End of April

"Microsoft plans to release the delayed "x64" versions of Windows Server and Windows XP at the end of April, a company spokesperson says. General availability of the 64-bit products could be announced at Microsoft's annual Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC), scheduled to begin April 25 in Seattle. Microsoft will have 64-bit news at the event, the spokesperson says. Until now, Microsoft had said the products would ship in the first half of 2005. The products were delayed last year from an end-of 2004 delivery target."

64 bit Windows is finally coming - and not a moment too soon, as I'm running a 64-bit AMD processor on my Media Center PC. The article doesn't make any mention of when the Media Center version, but I imagine that will come later. I'm curious how the pricing will work as well - will Microsoft expect us to shell out for a full-priced copy? Or will there be some sort of 32-bit to 64-bit upgrade option? The advantage of having a 64-bit OS, as I understand it, is that the OS can feed double the number of instructions to the CPU, resulting in faster overall execution. Where things will really start to change for the better is when we get 64-bit versions of our digital media applications - Photoshop, Premiere, Windows Media Encoder, etc.