End of next year is a very optimistic for AMD's 64-bit, I expect 32bit computing to dominate the market until 2005. You have to remember that even though Intel is playing down the role of pure 64bit computing, they do dominate the home and office PC markets. Moreover, AMD's 64bit can only dominate if there is sufficient 64bit software to allow it to fulfil its potential. WindowsXP 64bit edition feels to be just a stop-gap till Microsoft releases a proper OS that incorprates support for AMD.

So far 64bit is not much faster for the average desktop user. And multiprocessing doesn't do anything good.
 
It'll take a while until we will see some benefit from that in games and multimedia.

I'm thinking back to when the Pentium replaced the 486... it wasn't all that fast either, took a couple years. it all goes back to software support, if the 64bit apps aren't out yet, there's not much point in going 64bit now, especially when if you wait till the apps are out, the 64bit cpu will likely be much faster anyway.

Right now, it's really not useful for the desktop, but AMD seems to have a solution that can go head to head with the Itanic and for quite a bit less. For the price, the Opteron and Athlon 64 are simply not in the price range for many people, and certainly not that useful in most cases. 64-bit is still in the server-class market, as far as I'm concerned.

I tend to agree that with the desktop market, you have to have software apps that take advantage of the 64-bit pathways to make it happen. The idea however of the Athlon64 is great in that it's backwards compatible with 32-bit apps and OS's, so you can't lose by upgrading and then waiting for the relase of said 64-bit apps
 
I'd jump at this once some of my favorite games take advantage of this but I don't see this happening until an OS takes adavantage of the 64-bit CPU.
 
Of course SUN Ultra Sparcs have been using 64-bit CPU's for awhile now however I can't run Diablo 2 on Solaris no can I

isnt it just like when we had 32bit proc but only 16bit os's?
no impact until 32bit software/os's came around.
 
i'll stick with my xeon's for now

Not until Windows 95 came did people start getting serious about 32-bit computing. Even though Windows 95 was hybrid 16-bit/32-bit OS. However, once editions of Office 95 and other programs came out in 32-bit form, 16-bit applications started to dry up quickly. I predict this is what will happen when 64-bit or 128-bit computing will come into play. So until Microsoft releases a proper version of Windows that supports 64-bit computing, then we can expect people to get serious about it.
 
However, games did take awhile to migrate away from MS-DOS roots. It might take awhile for games to root out of Win32. Since only now are games starting to leave the Win9x world, but the majority of games that will come out this year will still support Windows 98 and Windows Millennium.

AMD are in no position to lead the market.
IT staff still only purchase servers with Intel CPU's.
Companies will only buy new workstations if they have an Intel CPU.
64bit computing for the general home user is simply not required at the moment and bespite loads of people being generally interested in the technology they do not make up the mass percentage of the buying public.
 
Home users & companies alike are still drawn to the Intel badge.
With 32bit computing being on the majority of desks and 64bit being on the desks of those:
More money than they know what to do with
Must have the latest hardware
etc
 
Software houses are going to continue to support 32bit computer for much more than the 3 months until the end of the year.
Intel will dictate when and if the home computing/office computing market moves to 64bit.
Bottom line is that there are still plenty of people who do not or will not trust AMD.
Until AMD has a market share that can lead the way the computer market goes it will never be their choice.
They don't have the market share nor do they have the funds - 32bit will be the "de facto" for home & office computing for many, many months to come.