Brainboxes now offering 64-bit drivers for PCI and PCMCIA

January 13, 2005 / News

Brainboxes, the serial card and Bluetooth systems specialist, today announced the company is supplying 64-bit drivers for its range of PCI serial and parallel port cards, with support for Microsoft’s 64-Bit Edition of its operating systems Windows XP 64, and Windows Server 2003 64-Bit. Brainboxes will be shipping its 64-bit drivers with all current PCI serial and parallel port cards. A downloadable upgrade is available now from www.brainboxes.com 

Eamonn Walsh, managing director of Brainboxes commented, “Brainboxes believes it is the first company offering full support for 64-bit version of Windows XP and 2003 Server editions on PCI cards.” Walsh continued, “We expect the move to 64-bit systems to be rapid – driven largely by the need for higher-end server and high-speed gaming applications.”

64-Bit Edition of Windows supports far more physical memory than current 32-bit operating systems – up to 16 terabytes, a huge step from the 4GB supported by current 32-bit systems. This jump will mean more applications can run simultaneously, and more of the data can be stored in the system’s main memory. Graphics, modelling and database programs, as well as games programs will all benefit from this increased processing power. 64-bit systems are also predicted to make progress in realising a real-time language translation systems and real-time video rendering impossible with 32-bit systems.

A 64-Bit Edition of Windows is therefore likely to open up new areas of application as well as supporting higher-performance on each application, and allowing more users to work simultaneously on a single application. PC and server manufacturers are already building machines using processors from Intel (Itanium) and AMD (Athlon 64) capable of supporting 64-bit processing, so it is vital that all hardware components are available with drivers to support the higher-processing throughput.