With a jump to 64bit architecture heading our way very soon, many of us are wondering if our beloved OS will run on these new beasties, the x86-64 architecture from AMD and Intel's 64bit VLIW Architecture. Well some of the wait is over, according to an article appearing on Digit Life it appears as well as many other OS's AMD have tested BeOS in both 4.5 and 5.0 flavours on the Hammer (Opteron/Athlon 64) architecture. Well I guess it comes as no suprise, much as 16bit operating systems such as MS-DOS continued to run when we moved to x86-32bit, it would be expected that a 32bit OS would run on a new 64bit extension to the x86 architecture.

What benefits will we be seeing in BeOS? This is a question which only the future will answer.

Currently with a 32bit kernel, 32bit environment and 32bit applications x86-64 doesn't seem to offer much. Using one to run purely BeOS r5 would be like upgrading your 4 cylinder car to a V8 and then taking the spark plugs out of four cylinders (well it'll probably run smoother) seemingly a waste. To add further disappointment it's likely that the first of the x86-64 processors will have dramatically lower clock speeds than their 32bit counterparts.

But it's not all bad, improvements of the architecture suggest that we should see a minor increase in power per Mhz over the 32bit AthlonXP processors and the Opteron series promises superior SMP performance even in 32bit mode for configurations of 2 to 8 processors as well as a larger L2 cache of 1MB which should really help cut down on latency under heavy multitasking.

Further performance increases will be up to the resourcefulness of the BeOS community, wether we'll see a 64bit kernel in either Zeta, OpenBeOS or one of the other BeOS clones is something only time will tell and then its a matter of hoping that the rest of the OS will follow across to 64 bit code and take developers with it.