Matt Pietrek

One of the pleasures of working on the bleeding edge of Windows^® is poking around in a new technology to see how it works. I don’t really feel comfortable with an operating system until I have a little under-the-hood knowledge. So when the 64-bit editions of Windows XP and Windows Server™ 2003 appeared on the scene, I was all over them.

The nice thing about Win64 and the x64 CPU architecture is that they’re different enough from their predecessors to be interesting, while not requiring a huge learning curve. While we developers would like to think that moving to x64 is just a recompile away, the reality is that we’ll still spend far too much time in the debugger. A good working knowledge of the OS and CPU is invaluable.

In this article I’ll boil down my experiences with Win64 and the x64 architecture to the essentials that a hotshot Win32^® programmer needs for the move to x64. I’ll assume that you know basic Win32 concepts, basic x86 concepts, and why your code should run on Win64. This frees me to focus on the good stuff. Think of this overview as a look at just the important differences relative to your knowledge of Win32 and the x86 architecture.

One nice thing about x64 systems is that you can use either Win32 or Win64 on the same machine without serious performance losses, unlike Itanium-based systems. And despite a few obscure differences between the Intel and AMD x64 implementations, the same x64-compatible build of Windows should run on either. You don’t need one version of Windows for AMD x64 systems and another for Intel x64 systems.

I’ve divided the discussion into three broad areas: OS implementation details, just enough x64 CPU architecture to get by, and developing for x64 with Visual C++^®.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/05/x64/default.aspx