March 7th, 2007
Choosing between Vista x86 32 bit or x64 64 bit
Drivers are the death of x64
The second thing you must check is to see if all your hardware has x64 Vista driver support, either included in the OS or downloadable from the hardware vendor. At this point, many motherboard makers have failed to include the latest 5.1 sound and network drivers, and you might have to look to the chipset maker for drivers. For example, you can find Realtek 32/64 bit drivers here for Gigabit LAN and 5.1 audio support. NVIDIA has the latest 32 bit and 64 bit drivers. ATI (AMD) has 32 and 64 bit drivers here. Creative has drivers here, but its x64 support is sorely lacking, and it's either missing or in beta. While these are the fundamental hardware drivers you'll need, the killer for Vista x64 edition is finding drivers for obscure hardware like cameras, printers, scanners, and other accessories.
You don't have to worry about 32 bit software compatibility in Windows Vista or XP x64, since they run natively and seamlessly, but drivers are an absolute killer. If you happen to find 32 bit drivers for your device but no 64 bit drivers, you're out of luck if you're running x64 Windows XP or Vista. For this reason, x64 edition for a typical consumer is usually not very practical because there are simply too many hardware peripherals you won't be able to use. Getting the computer itself to work is relatively easy; it's the one or two obscure devices that stops you dead in your tracks if you must have that device working. For this reason, no PC maker (that I'm aware of) will pre-load x64 edition of Windows on its PC because it will be a support nightmare if a customer starts complaining about a printer driver that won't load. To this date, Apple iTunes won't support any x64 edition of Windows, and it will absolutely not work at all because of hardware driver issues.
Servers, on the other hand, don't typically ever need to see peripheral devices, and they need to work with only the limited set of hardware they're sold with. Any self-respecting server hardware trying to sell you something like an HBA Fiber Channel adapter or iSCSI adapter will have to offer full x64 support. Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, for example, ONLY comes in x64 editions, and we're likely to see more software coming out like this to promote 64 bit. There is very little risk in standardizing on x64 edition in the data center since all legacy 32 bit applications will run natively at full speed.
Dedicated workstations for professionals are another great candidate for x64 edition so long as they're willing to put up with limited peripheral support. x64 allows high performance computing tasks to run extremely fast and efficiently. The free Paint.NET image editing application, for example, is fully optimized for multi-core and x64, yet Adobe can't get its act together and won't even release an x64 edition of the upcoming Photoshop CS3. That doesn't mean you can't run x86 Photoshop; in fact, it will still probably run a little better on Windows x64 because more than 4 GBs of RAM can be supported with ease, which gives more memory to Photoshop. It's just a crying shame for Adobe to lag behind, because Paint.NET has shown tremendous speed increases using x64 for filtering and layering effects on the order of 50 to 100 percent speed boosts. Adobe should have been supporting x64 two years ago and it won't even do it next year.
The bottom line is that you have to look at your own hardware limitations before you can make any kind of a transition. If all the hardware you want to use will work on Vista x64, it's well worth the transition.
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George Ou is Technical Director of ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
