When Microsoft issued a press release today announcing its committment to support AMD's 64-bit Opteron and Athlon 64 CPUs, we had to check the date. Wasn't this announcement made, albeit by AMD and albeit confined to Opteron only, in April 2002? Err, yes, it was.

So what's new today? Well, Microsoft says it should have Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 beta releases running natively on AMD's 64-bit chips in "the middle of 2003". That's after the Opteron launch, but ahead of the Athlon 64, which is expected to arrive in September.

This should finally quash speculation that Microsoft's support for AMD's 64-bit platform was somehow less than half-hearted. ®

Related StoryWindows on Itanic