If you watch the CPU trends, the 64-bit computing has been here for years, but strangely in the commodity market of the x86 CPU, widespread adoption has not been as widespread compared to the high-end Unix and mainframe environments.

Now Microsoft are leading from the front by moving their own web servers to 64-bit CPUs - primarily to remove the memory limitations and therefore improve the speed and performance.

To show you how it is done, they've released a white paper on how it was done.