Windows 64Bit AMD and Intel processor rundown

I just purchased a new 64-Bit AMD computer and installed Windows 64-Bit AMD for the first time.

Here’s a short rundown on what I found out during my first night of using it.

There are 2 main types of 64-bit processors, IA64 and x64, and they run different versions of windows 64-bit.
That means that every driver built for Windows 64-Bit needs to be compiled twice.

The IA64 processor was called the Itanium. It was a huge flop because of problems with the way they did the caching. It was replaced with the Itanium 2, which has a better design for cache. Itanium 2 does not mean dual processors, but instead it means the 2nd design of Itanium (version 2). It is referred to the Itanium 2 CPU. It is now referred to as IA64 only.

With x64 you can install both Windows 32 bit or Windows 64 bit. With IA64 you can only install the IA64 Windows. You can run 32-bit apps on all variants. For the 64-bit Windows versions you can run the applications through an emulator that works transparently called Windows 32 on Windows 64 (WOW64)

The same does not hold for 32-bit drivers though. WOW64 is only for user mode applications.

On 64-bit machines there are actually 2 different registries. A 32-bit registry and a 64-bit registry. They are treated as different registries by 32-bit and 64-bit applications but the 32-bit registry is just a subkey for the 64-bit registry. Windows will automatically route an application to the proper registry depending on if it’s 32-bit or 64-bit.

Because of WOW64, any application that was compiled before on a 32-bit machine, will still work in 64-bit Windows. This isn’t because it supports it direclty, but because windows is using WOW64 to translate the 32-bit calls to 64-bit ones. If however a program depends on a driver, or if it integrates with the windows shell, then that program will no longer work. I believe IPC is also translated on the fly by WOW64.

Some other useful information.

These 2 directories are both for 64-bit applications/drivers only. Pretty great naming! :), but I’m sure it will save many headaches for inf file authors.

• C:\Windows\System32\
• C:\Program Files\

These 2 directories are for 32-bit apps and drivers only, they use 32-bit emulation

• C:\Windows\SysWOW64\
• C:\Program Files (x86)\

So developing for 64-bit machines can get a little tricky if you actually want it to run as a 64-bit program. If it’s running as a 32-bit program, then your ints will still be 4 bytes, and everything else you hold true will also still hold.

Right now, when I want to make a 64-bit program, I use a makefile instead of using Visual Studio directly. You can use different NSIS .exes to generate the different installers. I suggest to build each project with 3 different versions of NSIS. Then if you want to, you can build a 32-bit installer wrapper that combines each of your installers.