2 March 2005 Microsoft has announced that the delayed version of its 64-bit compatible Windows operating system will be available this April.

Speaking at the Intel Developers Forum in San Francisco, Windows Jim Allchin, senior vice president of platforms at Microsoft, said that the desktop version of ‘Windows x64’ will be available at the beginning of April, with the server edition following shortly after

The new version of the operating system will make use of the greatly increased physical memory that 64-bit processors allow. This is of particular interest for those companies running data-intensive applications, such as enterprise resource planning or customer relationship management systems.

To date 64-bit architectures have failed to take off. This is partly because there have been few applications that have been rewritten to run in a 64-bit environment.

Microsoft’s release of a 64-bit version of Windows will go a long way towards validating the architecture. Some industry watchers have suggested that 64-bit architectures offer Microsoft the possibility of making its code much more secure.

However, Microsoft is running late with the release. Initially it had been anticipated that x64 would be available in 2004.

Senior product manager at Microsoft John Borozan recently said in a statement that “volume deployment of x64 will spur new opportunities for innovation that were previously limited by 32-bit barriers.”