Pay attention to the important bits

In the IT industry we are used to fast innovation and frequent changes to systems on which organisations depend. It is surprising then that we are only just talking about the move to 64bit computing for mainstream apps.

It seems a lifetime ago that 32bit took over from 16bit. Come to think of it, it is a lifetime ago for some people. There are IT professionals who will never have worked on 16bit systems (as for 8bit, we won't even go there).

Yet despite rapid changes elsewhere in IT, 64bit is still only on the edges of mainstream business applications ? the ones we all use every day. Microsoft's move towards 64bit operating systems will soon hasten progress, however. Until now, application developers have been loathe to produce 64bit applications because there was no desktop operating system to support them; or at least, not one that was widely used.

Chip giants Intel and AMD are at daggers drawn over the emerging 64bit market. But it is not only in the realm of 64bit computing that Intel and AMD are fighting for a new market. Both firms have released dual-core processors ? which stop processors acting as central heating systems by dividing the tasks between two cores. Whether this will excite much interest in the general market is open to debate, but with more and more consumers running multiple applications and multi-tasking, it is possible that this rather than the 64bit market will be the main battleground.

AMD argues that it has an advantage in the dual-core market as its Opteron chips are compatible with existing sockets, while Intel's require new motherboards.

Intel spokeswoman Laura Anderson stated that Intel would "leave the debates over design elegance to others", but this is disingenuous. Backwards compatibility has always been an issue in matters of IT investment and cannot be so easily dismissed.

It is strange that business managers often give so little consideration to the technology that runs the systems on which we rely. They spend endless hours talking about abstractions and conceptual architectures and infrastructures, but leave the real power provider in the realm of the technical "geeks".

Processor power and processor design deserve more attention.

I am not suggesting that finance officers should involve themselves at this level, but chip technology is a business issue. A good analogy is the process of buying a car. One of the most important choices is the engine size. Processors are the engines of computers, so they deserve a similar level of consideration.