At this very moment, fork lifts and moving crews prepare to tear apart the Moscone Center West in San Francisco where IDF was held this week in preparation of the next big event. The next convention could be on warfare textiles or toys; this writer does not know. This is in the middle of the legions of homeless and starving vagrants that the San Francisco cops, forced by local laws, must vigilantly keep out of the picture. This is where traffic snarls between the Golden Gate Bridge and farther south, in Silicon Valley. Along the coast, surfers, many of which are technology industry multi millionaires and don't give a damn anymore, ponder what exciting technology really was meant to be and what it is today, as they bob up in down in the lineup waiting for the next wave.

The Moscone Center is also where Intel this week made what its PR reps may say was its most significant series of announcement of the year, during the famous Intel IDF. So what did Intel really say, and how does it specifically relate to 64 bit applications?

The Real 64 Bit News

This week, besides the lip service played to its "Digital Home," analogous to Bill Gate's long-time ridiculous routine when he would hold up and then tout the Web Pad, which weighed like a brick, as the next generation application, Intel did make some substantive announcements regarding its 64 bit computing roadmap. Intel announced the availability of 64-bit extensions for its 32 bit, x86 server chipsets. These extensions are in fact verbatim to those of AMD's, as Geek.com has pointed out Based on the Prescott, and pre-dated by months and months of rumors, the company also said this week it would offer a 64 bit Pentium Xeon server processor and later this year, for high-end desktops, it will offer a 64 bit processor based on the Prescott core.

Also during Intel's keynote speech, a video was piped in featuring Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer who said that 64 bit Windows will support 64 bit x86 Systems. Absent, of course, was the fact that 64 bit Windows has long supported AMD's 64 bit Opteron and Athlon64. Why even bother?