“I have been a product guy in this industry for 20 years, and these are the weeks you live for. Not only do we have AMD announcing their Opteron processor this week, we are also launching Windows Server 2003, which is the next generation Windows Server platform force that has 64-bit computing natively built into the platform for the first time in the server, and also in the workstation release we will be doing. Before I get started, when we started working on this project many years ago with AMD—we’ve been there from the beginning with this project—they came to us and they said, “Gee, we’d like to do something new.” I said, “Well, that’s interesting. What do you want to do?” They said, “We’d like to do a 64-bit processor.” I said, “Well, that’s kind of interesting. What else?” They said, “Well, we’d like it to be 32-bit compatible.” We said, “Whoa, that would be pretty interesting.” And they said, “We’d like it at a price performance level that makes it pervasive and can be used in any workload in the industry in a very cheap way.” We said, “Oh, that’s very interesting.” So we’ve been working together with AMD since the beginning on this project, and it’s been an exciting project all the way through.

First of all, I’d like to congratulate Jerry, Hector, Dirk, and everybody else at AMD for delivering on what you started out to do many years ago; and I’d just like to say congratulations for that. Alright. So 64-bit computing, we think it’s the wave of the future. Up until this point, 32-bit is still very pervasive but the beautiful thing about the Opteron processor is it’s a 32-bit processor also. So don’t forget about that. We’ve optimized Windows Server 2003 and XP, and the future versions of Windows will be optimized still for 32-bit computing and will be optimized to run on the Opteron as much as any other 32-bit processor out there. The same thing with 64-bit. Like I said, this is the first solution to the server we’ve done that is 64-bit compatible, 64-bit design, 64-bit code throughout the entire server. So this platform, when we ship it and launch it in two days, will be 64-bit enabled from day one. So as we go down the validation phase for the Opteron Processor there isn’t a lot that we have to change in the platform and it isn’t just about scientific computing. It isn’t just about database computing. It’s about making a Windows server and a Windows desktop run in 64-bit in every workload that any customer might want to run it in. That’s what it’s all about. And 64-bit is the wave of how we get to that pervasive high end computing model today; but also will become pervasive in just about every workload in the future as we move from 32-bit to 64-bit in the world; and the Opteron is a great step to help us get there. We really like the chip.

From Server 2003, we’ve added a couple of new packages, SKUs, or workload scenarios. In one, we’ve added the web server capability for the Web edition, and also small business edition server for Windows 2003. So we’ve actually expanded our server line that we’ll be talking about on Thursday to really talk about how we can take the server to new workload scenarios and really optimize around some of these workloads that are important for the customer. Not just database, not just scientific computing, but all computing. Server 2003 had been by far the broadest server platform tested before we released it to manufacturing that we’ve ever had. We’ve had over 600,000 downloads. We’ve had over 600,000 users on this thing. We’ve got over 10,000 web servers that are Internet basing today running in production. We’ve had hundreds of customers that have been running in production, so we think it’s the most tested platform we’ve got available today.

As far as workloads, we tested it in 64-bit scenarios in all of those workloads. So like I said, it’s the first release that we’ve done that native from the beginning 64-bit enabled. As I said, AMD Opteron processor not only delivers great 32-bit performance but we are seeing some great 64-bit performance out of the Opteron processor and the server release that we will be doing. This summer, we’ll be releasing the beta version of the server, and it’s our goal—of course, we don’t release servers until we absolutely have the highest quality there—but it’s our goal that we will release the manufacturing, a version of Windows Server 2003 this year that supports the Opteron processor; and then with that comes the additional apps and things like that that Microsoft will deliver. So as long as our testing continues in the way it’s been going, we will deliver that release this year.

The other thing I’d like to talk about is not only about the performance capabilities, but the compatibility capabilities. We are seeing some great compatibility in running 32-bit applications on top of the Windows 64-bit platform. So we are also optimizing not only to run great 64-bit applications, but we are also optimizing Windows to also run 32-bit applications even better than what you can perhaps see in certain memory constraints or certain processor constrained scenarios on Windows 32. So we’ll make 64-bit not only great for 64-bit applications, but we’ll make it also run 32-bit applications in a great way. I’m not just talking about server applications, I’m also talking about desktop applications.

So what we are seeing is great. What we’re seeing has been fantastic.”