Under the hood of Advanced Server Limited Edt.
ENT News | at | by Mike
Microsoft Corp. unveiled a new version 1.2 release of its Windows 2000 Advanced Server Limited Edition (ASLE) operating system last month. The software giant says that ASLE 1.2 is designed to take advantage of some of the performance improvements - including a higher clock-speed and an improved bus architecture - boasted by Intel Corp.'s Itanium 2 microprocessor. ASLE 1.2 may benefit just as much from the efforts of two prominent vendors - Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) and Unisys Corp. - which have developed unique system architectures to support mixed IA-64, IA-32 and (in the case of HP) PA-RISC environments.
First, the basics. ASLE 1.2 is the second rev of Microsoft's 64-bit server operating system. ASLE 1.0, Microsoft's first foray into 64-bit computing, shipped in August 2001, and was followed in October by a 64-bit version of the software giant's Windows XP Professional operating system. Sixty-four-bit ASLE is generally positioned for large database or compute-intensive environments; 64-bit Windows XP Professional is marketed as a Windows platform for high-performance workstations.