To sell the Athlon64, AMD needs good salesmanship, and it is clear that it is taking a no holds barred approach; but without a 64-bit operating system, let alone 64-bit programs, only top-end segments are going to pick up and run with the Athlon64 right now.

The excitement rose a little at the AMD press conference the moment Jimmy Chen from Microsoft took to the stage, and announced that while WindowsXP 64-bit Beta 1 is sampling right now to OEMs, the full operating system is expected to be available to the public in Q1 of 2004.

Details were very slim, but the high-end OS will be targeted to equally high-end workstation users, will offer increased floating point performance, and, upto 16TB (Terabytes) of physical RAM.

With a 64-bit operating system arriving from Microsoft in 2004, the short term future of the Athlon64 looks a whole lot brighter, and the long term looks a heck of a lot more exciting.

A picture says more than a 1000 words, and since I'm just about to run off to another meeting for PCstats.com at Computex 2003, I'll leave you with a nice assortment of Athlon64 motherboards that are currently hitting the market.