Microsoft announced that it will release its 64-bit Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP OS for processor manufacturer AMD's soon-to-be-released Opteron and Athlon64 processors. Most versions of Windows' operating systems are written for the 32-bit x86 processor, so Microsoft had to recode the operating system for Windows to run Opteron or Athlon64. AMD's processors will reportedly rely on the x86-64 instruction set, which adds 64-bit extensions to the x86 instruction set used in 32-bit Intel and AMD processors.

Read more on this good news for AMD here.