What if you buy a INTEL 32 bit Centrino or Yonah?

INTEL claimed that need for 64 bits is not there, no one needs more than 4GB on notebooks, Pentium M 32 and Yonah 32 are just fine. Wrong!

Modern CPUs are all 64 bit. The PowerPC for Apple Macs, the GameCube, the PlayStation 2, the Xbox 360, the coming PS3, the SUN UltraSparc, the IBM Power5 and the AMD Opteron, Athlon64, Turion 64 and Sempron 64 are all 64 bits.

In Sun Java VM and Microsoft C# (.NET CLI), the long integers are 64 bits. On 32 bit machines like Yonah and Sossaman, such 64 bit integers have to be emulated using two 32 bit ones. There is no such performance degradation on native 64 bit CPUs such as AMD64.

The PC industry is moving to 64 bit, as INTEL slowly followed AMD's lead into x86_64. Microsoft has released Windows XP x64 and Windows Vista will be a major push for pervasive 64 bit computing. Bill Gates made this a major thing.

32 bit will be obsolete by the end of 2006.

For AMD64 users, they can download any Windows program, 32 bit or 64 bit, and run them equally fine. This is because AMD64 can run 64 bit and 32 bit programs simultaneously. I am doing this right now with my Windows XP x64 on Athlon 64, all my old 32 bit applications run without change.

For Yonah and Sossaman users, what they will encounter will be this: after hours of download, when they click the program exe to run, it pops a mysterious message saying: "Sorry, this is not a valid Windows program".

Our poor fellow is going to call support, put on hold for 30 minutes, then get an explanation if he is lucky:"The app you downloaded was 64 bit and your Yonah32 can't run it". If he is unlucky, the support guy will have no clue and will ask the poor guy to reformat hard drives and reinstall Windows 32 bit version.

To use a metaphor, AMD64 is like a DVD-ROM drive, it can play both DVDs and CDs. The 32 bit Yonah and Centrino is like a CD-ROM drive, it can only play CDs. Buying Yonah or Centrino is like buying a CD-ROM drive when DVD is getting popular.