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Speaking at the WinHEC 2007 conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates outlined the benefits of 64-bit computing, such as the amount of information that can be crunched in one go as a data set and advanced memory technology.

However, Gates admitted there are still challenges to overcome on the road to full 64-bit support. 'For the industry it does mean a change in drivers,' he said. 'We can't have a 32-bit driver with 32-bit pointers able to put information anywhere into a 64-bit address space. And so although it's not a dramatic change to create a 64-bit driver, there's still

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work to be done. The industry I'd say is about halfway through getting all those pieces in place. So, we're certainly pushing that, and trying to make that very straightforward for all of you.'

Looking ahead, it was the benefits for data storage in particular that he highlighted, tying this in with a move away from traditional disk-based storage to Flash alternatives.

'Well, 64-bit allows us to have lots of memory. And as we have lots of memory, very advanced scenarios around visual information, business intelligence information, they all come in to reach,' Gates claimed. 'In fact, many things that we used to think about as being disk-based now are being moved in and being memory based.

'And so Microsoft and others are doing a lot of innovation in what we call in-memory database technology, making navigation very, very quick. Every tier of the storage hierarchy is getting far, far bigger, and that means a very big level of ambition for things that wouldn't have been possible in the past.'

Microsoft claims there have already been 100,000 downloads of Windows Server 2008 Beta 3, the feature-complete version of the software that was released three weeks ago.