I noticed you stated:
"In the context of playing video games, PAE offers zero practical benefit, in particular because there are almost no 32bit-only personal computers out there that implement PAE at the motherboard chipset level that have more than 4GB of memory"

Are you saying 64-bit CPUs won't gain any benefit from PAE either as that is what I'm using XP Pro SP3 on?

Again I haven't tested it myself as I don't know of any programs that I have used that use more memory than XP can use. However you are incorrect in stating that there is no software that can use PAE on Windows 32-bit. Again if I couldn't use PAE even in its limited Microsoft Patched kernel form I am still about to create a Ramdrive that uses memory exceeding the 3GB-4GB range. Are telling me this has nothing to do with PAE at all and can be accomplished on standard XP installations and if so how is the Ramdrive accomplishing this task of using this memory above 4GB?

As far as XMS/EMS actually many people used that back in the day to play games that required memory above 640KB when QEMM wasn't enough for the program. I would say Westwood Studios and Origin Systems off the top of my head were two companies that used this memory management for their games. There are many other companies I'm sure if I dug around. I believe Doom 1 and 2 might have used that memory also.

Most people actually fiddled with the Config.Sys and Autoexec.Bat to squeeze the most out of their 640KB base memory and load most of the TSRs into upper memory.

A Ramdrive on XP is probably less likely to happen because for one it wasn't included with the operating system like how it was for DOS. Now I do recall possibly one made by Microsoft that was either for evaluation purposes but I think it was capped at 32MB which wasn't really useful. And most OS's used all of their installed memory and it isn't until we reached anything above 4GB that people began wondering should they install more memory if the OS can't use it? Then 64-bit consumer OSs arrived which solved the problem of unused memory in the 3.2GB to 4GB region and it wasn't very common to have more than 4GB of memory and most motherboards were capped to 1.5GB to 4GB at the high end in most P4 PCs running XP.

Although I would admit the last time I used a Ramdrive in Windows prior to XP was Windows 98 SE. Windows 98SE probably used 64MB at most and computers could install up to 1.5GB on most P4 systems so creating a large RAMDRIVE for decompressing files or as a browser cache location wasn't an unheard of use for it.

The difference is it is 2015 and we now have consumer motherboards that can hold up to 32GB or more. Memory prices have dropped significantly that having more memory than the OS can support can happen. In this specific scenario XP's longevity and support allowed a modern day Ivy Bridge to run it and also have surplus untapped memory. Because of this people can use Ramdrive software that only recently became available to take advantage of it. Now granted most people aren't going to care about Ramdrives (99%) and most likely just use a computer and shut it down. However the technical people like you are me who have the knowledge and perhaps curiosity or interest in doing something like this is what made it possible.





There are many uses for Ramdrives for XP.

In this case I'll mention a few of them for you if you haven't heard my reasons prior.

XP Temp drive location for decompressing files.

In Firefox you can set the temp folder pointing to the Ramdrive rather than your hard drive for your Firefox cache location.

This reduces wear and tear on mechanical hard drives for one and also allows quicker access times and faster web browsing response even if it may or may not be noticeable by you I can tell it is working.

Gaming. Most XP games when fully installed should be smaller than 28GB in total size. Assuming this is the case I can literally install any XP game, let's say Crysis onto the Ramdrive and run it. This will have reduced loading times which if you're aware of as these video files are quite large for 3D games. Again just to make a dual sided perspective this can also be done for Vista, 7, 8, and 10 and not exclusive to XP. However the newer the game is the larger the installed size making it harder and harder to accomplish this if there is not enough Ramdrive space.





With Skylake, Kabylake, and Cannonlake 64GB memory on consumer motherboards will be possible and perhaps 128GB as Samsung has successfully created 32GB DDR4 memory a reality. So this will allow even most modern games to now fit into a Ramdrive.

SAMSUNG 32GB 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 2133 (PC4 17000) Server Memory Model M386A4G40DM0-CPB
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147384

Even if most people don't know about PAE they now know of it if they haven't heard about it. Also PAE is useful even on 32-bit versions of Vista, Windows 7, 8, and 10 which all have the 4GB limit imposed by Microsoft and can be patched despite being 32-bit to use all of their available memory.

Here's a link concerning those stuck on 32-bit version of Windows which can be unlocked.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/unlock-64gb-ram-32-bit-windows-pae-patch/

If you wanted to truly test out the same OS with different bit versions.

Install a 32-bit version of Windows 7 and another partition for a 64-bit version of Windows 7.

Test out the 32-bit version of Windows 7 with 32-bit version of Crysis.

Then do the same test with the 64-bit version of Windows 7.

Follow up with a 32-bit version of Windows 7 with PAE unleashed and then gather all the results if there is any difference between all three. Then you can see if PAE really has a negative or positive impact compared to standard Windows 7 32-bit eliminating it being an OS factor.

Personally like I stated before I'd rather keep XP 32-bit for 32-bit software and Vista or W7 64-bit for 64-bit software in a Multi OS set up.

I inferred that as I didn't see the relevance to the conversation as to what programs I might have installed that use more than 4GB of memory (technically it is actually around 3GB maximum per process for 32bit apps on Windows due to the way memory management is handled by the OS). If you're genuinely curious (although I can't imagine why)... there are a number of video games now that are 64-bit only and use more than 4GB of memory. The Witcher 3 is one example but you can peruse the system requirements for any video games on GOG/Steam/Origin/Uplay and you'll find tonnes of games use more than 4GB of memory nowadays and require a 64bit operating system as a result. Grand Theft Auto V is also 64bit only, and I believe Mortal Kombat X is, just a few off the top of my head, but Steam is littered with newer games that require 64bit Windows and state 6-8GB of RAM in their system requirements.

My decision to use a 64bit app is almost never based on how much memory the application uses however, and almost always based on the fact that I do run a 64bit OS on a 64bit CPU and 64bit CPU/memory bound applications will gain up to a 30% or more performance boost from running 64bit native. How much performance a particular application benefits really depends on exactly what that application is doing and how it is using the CPU, whether it has any other bottlenecks such as waiting for disk/network I/O or other factors. So there are generally no good reasons for me to use 32bit apps if a 64bit version is available. Generally the only reasons to date that I've had to stick with or fall back to the 32bit version of a particular application is if the 64bit version is sufficiently new and not as well tested and debugged in the wild. Sometimes it takes application authors a while to make their applications 64bit clean and in the mean time occasionally one will find the 64bit version is not as stable or reliable. That is not very common nowadays as it was 8 years ago however as most have made the transition now.


That sounds reasonably like I would expect. I don't know what the system requirements are for Crysis, but the system requirements for Windows Vista are higher than they are for Windows XP for sure in terms of RAM used by default by the OS. So just using even the 32bit version of Vista would gobble a lot more memory than XP does by default leaving less RAM available for video games. Using the 64bit version of Vista would further put pressure on memory by about 25-50% more because 64bit apps use about that much more RAM on average. The result is that the combination of using Vista instead of XP and also 64bit OS instead of 32bit OS leaves a lot less RAM available for applications. Video games that use a lot of RAM may not have enough free memory to operate optimally and what can happen is that it causes the OS to swap to disk. If this happens a lot you will find that the game assets end up getting pagefaulted into memory while you play and you experience great slowdowns and jerky high-latency behaviour. This is usually an indication that the system as it is configured does not have enough RAM to properly run the given application.

The system requirements for Crysis according to Steam are: Memory: 1.0 GB RAM (XP) or 1.5 GB RAM (Vista)
I couldn't find the system requirements for Vista 64bit with a quick search but they are probably something like "minimum 1GB, recommended 2GB" being conservative. If we take the lowest, that would be 1GB. Coupled with the game's stated requirements that would be 2.5GB of memory needed not taking into account other software that is running in Windows such as firewalls, a web browser or other applications or other security software or other systray utils. If we assume no other apps are running, the game would struggle to run simple due to there not being enough memory to adequately meet the minimum recommended system requirements.

This would be a case where using the 64bit Vista operating system on the given computer is a bad choice because the system does not have enough RAM in it to handle the OS and the applications running on it, so it will thrash swap whenever a game or other application needs more memory than what is available. The fact that 64bit apps need 25-50% more RAM only makes the problem worse.

The lesson to be learned there is that overloading a computer that is low on memory by installing a newer OS that has higher RAM usage, and using the 64bit version that has even higher RAM usage is likely to result in reduced performance for asking the computer to do more than its hardware is capable of doing. In this case the better solution insofar as that particular game is concerned is to use the 32bit OS and game, but that is not because 64bit applications or OS are slower, it is because the computer itself is inadequate to properly run the 64bit OS and applications it is being asked to run.

In 2015, I definitely would not recommend anyone install the 64bit version of any Windows OS on a computer with 2GB of RAM. With 3GB of RAM it may or may not be worthwhile depending on what games or apps one hopes to run. If for example one has a game that has 64bit binaries available and the combination of the games RAM requirements and Windows 64bit is less than 3GB then there is a good chance the game will perform better under the 64bit OS with a 64bit game binary. If Windows+game RAM requirements are greater than 3GB then it is probably not a good idea. For 3GB machines though it can go either way and one may need to experiment to see what works best. Overall I'd recommend using a 32bit OS on a 3GB machine unless one is certain that the performance gains of 64bit OS and apps will not be undermined by not having enough RAM for them to operate properly. 4GB machines are a bit of a special case, as Windows can use 4GB of RAM but not make it all available to applications due to limitations of both the CPU and OS (true with any OS). As such games on a 32bit OS are pretty much limited to 3GB or less of memory even if 4GB is present, however the OS will fit itself into that upper 1GB freeing more of the remaining 3GB for the apps. Again, whether a 64bit OS+app works better ultimately depends on how much RAM the OS requires and how much the game/app requires mandatory. If you have less RAM than the requirements of the software, then experience performance degradation.

Stick 4GB of RAM into that Vista64 computer and if that game has 64bit binaries, you will almost certainly see greater performance. If the game is only a 32bit game however, while it might see higher performance I wouldn't expect any miracles. The real performance comes from the application itself being 64bit.

I wasn't focusing on AMD 64 bit processors versus Intel 64bit processors, I was referring to the micro-architecture itself, which is known officially as AMD64 as AMD is the one who designed and extended Intel 32bit architecture to 64bits originally. AMD's official name for their 64bit micro-architecture that has extended the Intel 32bit architecture to 64bits is "AMD64".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD-64
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD-64#History

At the time, Intel had been busy working with Hewlett Packard on their own custom 64bit architecture that was a clean departure from the Intel ia32 processor line. The new architecture they were developing with HP known as IA64 (Intel-Architecture 64) was a completely different architectural design intended for big iron enterprise systems and the processor produced was the Intel Itanium (don't feel bad if you've never heard of it, most people have not heard of it and never will fortunately). It was always Intel's intent to push IA64 to replace their IA32 processor line as well as to eradicate various competing CPU architectures such as Alpha, Sparc, PowerPC and others used in the enterprise.

The last thing Intel wanted to happen was for IA32 to be extended to 64bit as that would undermine their master plans with HP and the IA64 design. They wanted IA64 to be the dominant design and threw billions into it. The IA64 design was an absolutely horrid miserable flop however and did not succeed in the marketplace at all. Intel and HP themselves ended up using most of their own Itanium chips in the end. I've got an HP zx2000 Itanium workstation in my basement collecting dust. One of the worst pieces of junk I've ever had the displeasure to use.

But AMD and Intel have cross-licensing of each others patents on CPU design which allowed AMD to be able to go ahead and design a next generation 64bit processor based on the Intel IA32 micro-architecture themselves without having to seek Intel's approval. The architecture was codenamed X86-64 internally by AMD before release, and renamed to AMD64 when it was released commercially. The CPUs were codenamed the "Clawhammer" for the consumer oriented design and the "Sledgehammer" for the enterprise class CPU which eventually became known as the Opteron. I followed AMD's K8 AMD64 design quite closely for a few years snatching up every factoid I could about it and ended up fortunate enough to have one of the early AMD64 Clawhammer prototypes (AMD Solo) about a year before they were publicly available. The prototype was only 800MHz but was fascinating to get to work with early on. It later got upgraded to 1.6Ghz closer to consumer release and I still have it running today. :) Needless to say I've always been a huge fan of the AMD64 architecture design and I always give AMD props for what they have done, they deserve 100% recognition for extending Intel architecture to 64bit.

AMD produced these chips and put them to market without concern about what Intels plans were. Intel greatly resisted adopting AMD's 64bit technology for a full year while cloning it themselves internally as a fallback plan in the case that their own Itanium IA64 CPUs happened to fail in the marketplace while denying they were working on it. All along, Intel refused to publicly acknowledge AMD's design or give them credit for it while scrambling to clone it. However, once AMDs 64bit Hammer chips hit the market and were a massive success, Intel was greatly pressured by the marketplace into getting their own highly secretive clone chips out the door Intel (known as Yamhill if memory serves correct). Again though Intel didn't want to give any hint of credit towards AMD and so they did not use the "AMD64" architecture name, instead they originally called their 64bit clone chips "IA32e" for Intel 32bit architecture "enhanced" - a way of downplaying the 64bit element of it for marketing purposes hoping to get big corporate customers to use their inferior IA64 chips instead. The market wasn't that stupid however and Intel eventually changed the name to "Intel 64" reluctantly.

Even though Intel's clone of AMD64 came out about a year late, their first few generations of chips were pure garbage, plagued with incompatibilities and lacking many hardware features that AMD's designs used such as a built in IOMMU, lack of support for the NX security feature (no execute) and various other features.

Ultimately the marketplace went wild over AMD's 64bit chips while Intel scrambled to play catch up for a couple of years, and in the end the joint Intel/HP IA64 Itanium CPU was a bomb in the market and the entire world went with both AMD and Intel 64bit chips based on the AMD64 design.

The average consumer is probably completely unaware of all of these things of course and it may be considered to be computer history trivia, but you asked why I called it AMD64 and so now you know. :) AMD deserves 100% credit for engineering the 64bit micro-architecture that we all now use around the world whether we own an AMD or Intel branded CPU. Intel can call it whatever they want, but ultimately the architecture is known officially AMD-branded as "AMD64" or alternatively as the vendor-neutral name of "X86-64". In either case, the term "AMD64" is being used to refer to the entire generic architecture and not to a specific company's products. :)

So all Intel fanboys out there can thank AMD for the desgin of AMD64 archtecture we all now use and from saving us from the alternative plague that was known as IA64.

AMD FTW! :)

Pretty crappy. It was an Acer Veriton from 2004 era with a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 Northwood CPU, 2GB of RAM, and a 128MB AMD Radeon 9800 Pro AGP GPU. I had a 256MB X2600 Radeon also but it died not long before that. I used that up until February 2013 and it got increasingly painful over the last 3-4 years prior to building a new computer to say the least. ;o) It wasn't powerful enough to put a newer version of Windows on without becoming starved for RAM which would have meant games would have ran even more terrible, so I just dragged it out as long as possible.

WINE is not something that you run operating systems inside, rather it is Linux software that provides a Windows interface directly in Linux itself. It runs a variety of software quite well but not flawlessly, and each application you wish to run may or may not work at all or may not work reliably. Sometimes it can take a lot of tweaking and mucking around to get a game or application to work and each new release of Wine that comes out may break existing things you already had running fine.

So Wine is a great piece of software, but it is no panacea across the board for replacing Windows and it is not a push button solution but rather one for people who don't mind occasionally having to tinker to get things to work and don't mind if things that used to work yesterday might break randomly every time the software is upgraded.

In general I just want to get things working relatively effortlessly and then expect them to just keep working, so while I've used wine for various things in the past, it is not a solid alternative to running a native Windows OS for the wide variety of games and other applications I use. Wine is just not a good solution for a lot of the applications and games that I use at this point in time.

My own personal gameplan is to continue to use Windows 7/x64 for as it is supported by Microsoft unless I'm able to find solid alternatives for all of my games and other applications over time. I've got a good solid 4 years to find solutions for everything which is a lot of time so I'm not too concerned about finding replacements for now per se. I'll cross that bridge when the time comes though and Wine will most likely be a part of the solution but it wont be a complete solution on its own.

Dang, was it that obvious? :o)

Not even one. :oP

For the case of a 64bit capable CPU, the better solution is to run a 64bit OS even if you are mostly only running 32bit applications and games. This gives full access to all memory in the system without any performance penalties associated with PAE on an operating system that actually supports PAE for addressing memory above 4GB.

The problem with using PAE on Windows XP however is that while a PAE kernel is available that enables the PAE CPU feature, it does not enable access to memory over 4GB due to compatibility problems. The PAE kernel for Windows XP is intended for enabling the NX bit for security purposes as used by Microsoft's DEP feature as it is dependent on the PAE feature as well. Here is a quote from the Wikipedia article on PAE as it pertains to Windows XP:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension#Microsoft_Windows

----- quote -----
The original releases of Windows XP and Windows XP SP1 used PAE mode to allow RAM to extend beyond the 4 GB address limit. However, it led to compatibility problems with 3rd party drivers which led Microsoft to remove this capability in Windows XP Service Pack 2. Windows XP SP2 and later, by default, on processors with the no-execute (NX) or execute-disable (XD) feature, runs in PAE mode in order to allow NX.[18] The no execute (NX, or XD for execution disable) bit resides in bit 63 of the page table entry and, without PAE, page table entries on 32-bit systems have only 32 bits; therefore PAE mode is required in order to exploit the NX feature. However, "client" versions of 32-bit Windows (Windows XP SP2 and later, Windows Vista, Windows 7) limit physical address space to the first 4 GB for driver compatibility [14] via the licensing limitation mechanism,[13] even though these versions do run in PAE mode if NX support is enabled.
----- endquote -----

As you can see, on processors that do not have the NX feature, PAE is effectively disabled on Windows XP. The PAE kernel can be used on computers that do have the NX feature, which would be all AMD64 processors made by AMD, and almost all Intel 64 processors made by Intel excluding the first generation or two which lacked the NX feature, however on Windows XP this feature is limited to providing the NX security feature only and does not enable memory above 4GB due to compatibility problems. As mentioned, physical memory address space is limited to the first 4GB for driver compatibility.

So yeah, one can install Windows XP PAE support and it turns the bit on, and it also makes the NX bit available for the Windows DEP security feature, but it does not actually enable access to memory above 4GB on Windows XP. So while the CPU is technically able to do it, the operating system vendor (MIcrosoft) has chosen to disable that functionality because it causes known problems that can not be resolved. Having that security feature is nice but one isn't going to gain any performance nor access more memory by enabling PAE. That's basically the crux of what I've been trying to say all along. ;o)

If one has a 64bit capable CPU and one also has more than 4GB of RAM on the system I can't think of any truly good reason to not use 64bit Windows. If someone has old hardware to which 64bit drivers were never written and using 64bit Windows means they have to give up their old hardware then that might possibly be a reason for some to hold off, but if you have more than 4GB of RAM then it's just being wasted running a 32bit OS whether you have the PAE kernel installed or not.

As Obiwan Kenobi might say "PAE are not the droids you are looking for".

Do yourself a favour, if you have more than 4GB of RAM, backup all of your data etc. and install a fresh copy of 64bit Windows (I'd recommend Windows 7, but whatever is desired or the least of evils for the individual), then restore your data and enjoy having a faster computer with faster applications as that is almost a universal guarantee when you have 4GB+ of RAM in a system. As an unrelated suggestion, if you don't already have an SSD drive, I highly recommend throwing an SSD drive in there two. Those two changes, using a 64bit Windows and using an SSD drive combined will breathe new life into just about any old computer that has more than 4GB of RAM. The system itself will start up faster and run much smoother, and most applications will too. The absolute worst case is that a game/app will run the same as it did before. It's very unlikely to find any apps that end up performing worse than they did before in this case.

The only non-emotional reasons I can think of that might hold one back is if they have to purchase a new version of Windows and don't want to spend the money or can't afford it, or if it is too much effort to back up the computer and go through the migration/upgrade process. Another is if a game or piece of software that works on XP is known specifically to not work at all or not work properly under a new release of Windows. Those are legitimate problems to weigh in of course. I've had good luck with Google for working around such issues with various system/game tweaks etc. though personally so I don't let that stuff hold back my entire system from having an overall superior experience just for one game not working properly though. :)

You did some good reasoning on how the OSs would perform on both memory configurations and what you stated I already knew. XP's OS requires less memory and less overhead to tax the CPU and Vista 64-bit would require more and the extra bloated full installation size already is big clue that it's beefier and a memory hog which is why when laptops were labeled Vista capable they really weren't at the time until the specs finally caught up and made Windows 7 64-bit a success.

Also my interest in what software you had that used above 4GB was geared toward applications not necessarily games but obviously the games would most likely due to the 3D video files using the most memory. Maybe if you did some 4K HD video editing you may need large quantities of memory. But it's good to know you are playing the latest and greatest games as that would be sufficient reason alone to stick with W7 64-bit in your case.

However for myself I would enjoy playing the latest and greatest but I also am patient enough for when the time comes nVidia 4000 or later series in the future releases and they got a sub 50 watt passive graphics card that has W7 64-bit drivers and the performance is equivalent to the top of the line 1000 series of today. I know it would seem pointless to you but there's something nice about a completely passive system and one day there will be one final best performance low wattage passive graphics card for nVidia last to support Windows 7 64-bit and I will be getting that card to test all the (in the future they would call) old school games of the W7 era. I'm sure by then I'll have some 20 core 128-bit CPU with 2TB of memory installed and most of it Ramdrive since W7 64-bit Ultimate is capped at 192GB of maximum memory and I'll hear you complaining then why would someone want to use an outdated Windows 7 64-bit SP1 it's not secure and no longer supported rambling when you can use Windows 15 Ultimate 128-bit...

As for the equal 4GB XP Pro SP3 32-bit vs 4GB Vista SP2 DX11 64-bit the performance on the fps on XP was superior and higher but given it was a couple years ago since I did the laptop test I can't give actual results from memory but it was a noticeable difference in performance for sure. As for disk thrashing the 4GB was enough memory to load the game without any noticeable thrashing. However I did do one test about a year ago when I managed to experiment with two 4GB memory modules and gave it another go. At the moment I can't remember if the 4GB to 8GB jump made a significant difference in performance or slight improvement in Crysis. On the XP 32-bit it would not be an advantage at the time of the test because I had not discovered how to tap into the memory region above 3.2GB and aside from that the complete installation of Crysis 1 would topple 4GB so there would be way for me to test installation the game into the Ramdrive for XP and try it out on the laptop to see if any performance boost was significant over the mechanical laptop hard drive. This would eliminate any potential thrashing or reading from the disk adding any delay. However since my friend's laptop was an ongoing project that got suspended temporarily till I could get things in order here I still have possession of it and could do another final test comparing 8GB on both OS's.

However I think it would a better test for me to do it on a desktop computer. More CPU power, more RAM, more powerful video card, and the ability to run the entire game off a pure RAM DISK would provide the best environment for testing the 32-bit XP, Vista 64-bit testing both 32-bit and 64-bit Crysis versions with DX9 imposed.

I would say that I doubt Crysis 1 with more than 8GB of installed memory would show any difference but again I haven't maxed out that game before and could do several tests. Low, Medium, High, and Very High detail settings if I used DX10/DX11 comparing both OSes and jotting down fps. It probably would be even better if I got my HD recorder going to record all of this video and audio footage during the tests. On top of that if I had time I could do a Windows 7 SP1 follow up test and Windows 10 if given the time for a more complete round up evaluation.

On that note regarding 64-bit OS being superior, I wish Intel or AMD would get their shit together and get us the 128-bit CPUs now then wait. They are just holding out until AMD offers any serious competition before releasing their next goodie. I know 128-bit may seem a bit extreme for today's purposes but I just can't see any significant changes they can do to really push the limits of desktop computers. The only thing both companies have done is add more cores and it will be awhile before we get 8 core desktop consumer CPUs as a common denominator and Intel might be holding out on those because AMD isn't really offering much competition for them yet which what they've come out so far which has been a bit disappointing. And nVidia really gave them a hard one when they dropped the Maxwell GTX 750 which in my opinion became the best lowest wattage graphics card with performance when my favorite AMD 6570 HD previously took that throne for my last build. Also even if pushing 128GB or 256GB on upcoming generation motherboards the fact is jumping to 128-bit is just the threshold I'm yearning for so all the software will be standardized to support 64-bit similar how the transition from 32-bit to 64-bit has taken this long and nearing completion. Of course the other way they could go is release quantum processors which would probably be superior to a 128-bit CPU at this point.

Interesting footnote in AMD history. :) If only the Intel / AMD kept sharing technologies. During the earlier days I believe the 386 was the last time both of them worked together before breaking up. Because of AMD's backward compatibility issues post 486 era I strayed away from them but chose Intel as the Pentium progressed. Things I wanted were not always on the AMD motherboards was another concern.

Also I wasn't one of those people who constantly upgraded every year or two when my needs were met with what I had and lack of income to jump onto the next new thing.

Some notables that helped me make my decision in getting the P4 over AMD was it had 3 ISA slots which allowed me to keep my Sound Blaster for older DOS games, Network ISA card that worked on DOS for network LAN play, and the other ISA slot I can't remember if I actually used but kept as a buffer just in case I wanted to another sound card brand like a Gravis Ultrasound for Dual Sound Card comparison as certain sound cards provided different instrument effects or had better sound support.

Other things that helped me narrow down that motherboard was the P4 3.06 GHz support was at the top end of CPUs then. I think at the time the P4 motherboard had all the necessary legacy devices I needed. It had a dual floppy controller, serial port, parallel port, PS/2 keyboard, and PS/2 mouse port. Most of this has become irrelevant today but this was during the IDE hard drive era prior to SATA full adoption and supported 4 maximum IDE devices which at the time hard drives 80GB was a safe capacity to choose and could get up to 320GB in one system although Windows 98 SE had a hard time seeing hard drives over 64GB in DOS modem so FDISKing large capacity drives were difficult until they released the 64GB Fdisk fix. It also had a peak memory capacity of 2.0GB = 1GB x 2 which isn't much today but running Windows 98 SE at the time it was considered extreme if you had that much memory which is why Ramdisks were useful in my case.

So not everyone's choice of CPU is based on being a fan boy of one or the other but their actual needs.
ISA slots became a premium and rare by the time P4s came out and you were lucky to find more than two ISA slots and even harder to find any AMD motherboards with limited vendors even offering ISA slots. Care to mention any AMD motherboards with ISA slots during the P4 era?

As for Fanboy support I would be in the camp of all computers in the golden era. I have an IBM PC, XT, AT 286, 386, 486, IBM PCjr, and Tandy 1000 from the PC category. Other Non PCs include Apple ][e, ][ GS, Commodore 64 and 128, Amiga 500 and 1000, Atari 2600 / 6200, 400, 800, 800XL, 1200XL, 65XE, 128XE, 520 ST, 1040 ST, MAC Classic, MAC Color, MAC SE/30, MAC Power PCs, MAC G3, iMAC, and TI-99/4A off the top of my head. So the processors inside was not really important but what the computers could do and in my case was gaming. Without any of the early IBM PC bootable games before DOS I wouldn't have been able to get into boring computers. You can thank Roberta Williams for being a main contributor of me playing my first pirated King's Quest 1 bootable game and getting hooked ever since then. And this was when CGA 4 color was considered the epitome of gaming with the dreaded single channel PC internal speaker for sound support loading off of a 360KB 5 1/4" floppy disk.

As interesting and lovely the history of AMD64's influence in the 64-bit CPU architecture I think most people probably will still chose an Intel 64-bit CPU given they have the funds over an AMD CPU. Although for graphics cards I have bought many AMD graphics cards and in case you are indeed an AMD fanboy you might be interested in my collection of AMD ICs dating back to the early x86 era till the 486. I think the motherboard where I was a Sysop for a BBS ran off of an AMD 386 CPU.

Now some real accolades should be given to Intel for creating the Pentium M mobile CPU line for efficiency. When using ultralite laptops and trying to get the lowest TDP of 5 Watts with highest performance I think this one takes the crown. After this line the Mobile P4 and later were not as efficient and I don't even consider Intel Atoms worthy of being in the same category. Each watt counts when you're running off a laptop battery and if you could squeeze out more minutes on the go the better.

Intel® Pentium® M Processor ULV 733/733J
(2M Cache, 1.10A GHz, 400 MHz FSB)

http://ark.intel.com/products/27609

or this one at 5.5 Watts TDP

Intel® Pentium® M Processor ULV 773
(2M Cache, 1.30 GHz, 400 MHz FSB)

http://ark.intel.com/products/27611

Now my real interest in AMD "if" you have the knowledge, can you tell me which was the last AMD chipset generation and if possible the highest end AMD CPU that worked on that motherboard that had AHCI driver support for XP 32-bit?

For Intel it's the Ivy Bridge generation with the Z77 chipset.

Also which is the last AMD iGPU to have XP 32-bit drivers?

For Intel it's the Intel HD 4000 iGPU.

These two factors would help me build a pure XP-32bit system running on the last generation that AMD offered XP driver support for it.

I need an equivalent AMD fanboy XP system to compete with my Intel XP system using the most modern specs and compare which is truly superior AMD or Intel?

Full benchmarks to follow suit as the reward... ;)

Who will be crowned FTW? Tick Tock.

Ug.. sorry when I saw the word "Acer" I cringed... okay continuing reading your post now.

Well if you hadn't upgraded I would have told you to upgrade your AGP to an AMD HD 3450 AGP version because you had no PCIe slot and also PCIe was usually the cut off point of killing off Windows 98SE driver support. But that is only if you had no plans on upgrading the computer with limited funds. This is what I did because I wasn't ready to leave my P4 motherboard with all its legacy support. This graphics card was low wattage and allowed me to even play Blu-ray movies although laggy on XP. This helped plant the seed for when I upgraded my computer I knew I could let go of my PS3 for Blu-ray playback and not be constantly updating the PS3 firmware that took away OtherOS which meant no Linux OS on PS3 even though I never installed Linux I wanted the option not taken away.

Now that your off that "Acer" brand... cringe, what are now your current PC specs?

Damn WineHQ can't run Windows inside it? I remember seeing a Sony PS3s running Linux on it and then Windows XP inside that done by someone on Youtube. I thought they were using WineHQ to do it. I think I even saw someone run Windows 95 in Linux on a PS3.

Any other options to run a Windows OS inside a Linux shell?

One day Windows 7 64-bit will lose MS support and for those who care about security updates but love Windows 7 64-bit are going to need a solution.

4 years is not a lot of time at least when I saw the last 4 years of my life it seemed to flash by.

Hell now my Ivy Bridge is kind of old now that I think about it. :)

No it wasn't a file system limitation in this case. The partition the MS OE was installed and kept the emails stored was on a FAT32 partition which has a 4GB file size limit (which also could be another hindrance later down the line). I primarily use NTFS now due to recording large > 4GB HD DVR videos. FAT16 which would have had a 2GB file size limit at the time as I know partition sizes were capped at 2GB a fact I commonly used for creating a DOS Boot partition.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/118335

The 2GB issue had something to do with the coding of the MS OE v4.0 at the time not foreseeing a day when the entire inbox would grow to that size. I guess they didn't anticipate spam and large file attachments being downloaded.

Let me see if I can find a link that talks about this. I lost a lot of downloaded email back in the day when this bug occurred which caused me to create folders to make smaller than 2GB files instead of one large one.

I found a link that talks about this issue:

http://www.stellaroutlooktools.com/blog/2gb-file-corruption-issues-in-outlook-express-dbx-reasons-and-tips-to-avoid-it/

This probably won't affect users today if they are using a newer version of OE or Thunderbird which doesn't corrupt itself at > 2GB.

Today I usually just login to check my email via the browser. Obviously the disadvantage is remembering the passwords for each email account and being limited in a lot of ways of what you can do within that interface vs something like OE or Thunderbird.

I tend to use computer hardware until it either dies or becomes extremely obsolete and no longer viable, so when I built my new PC in 2013 I built it to last for the long haul. I went with an AMD FX8350 4GHz with 32GB of RAM, or as I prefer to put it $200 worth of RAM. I say that because many people seemed to think 32GB was excessive and/or expensive and I just don't see it that way at all because when I built my first rather low end PC in 1994 in college, it was a 386DX40 with 4MB of RAM and the RAM alone cost me $400 so I considered getting 8192 times as much memory in 2013 for half the price to be an extreme deal. :) This machine was built as my main desktop PC both for gaming but for everything else as well, and I fully intended to be able to run tonnes of virtual machines on this puppy. I normally have 5 or 6 VMs running 24/7 but as many as 8 running and 32GB of RAM makes it easy to do that. Even if I really wanted to use Windows XP terribly badly, it is not even technically possible to handle this type of load. :)

I more or less do exactly the same thing as what you described, the one exception for me is that I wont run an unsupported OS, so if/when my OS is no longer supported I will either upgrade the OS or change to a different OS, and usually enough time has passed that my hardware is extremely outdated and it is necessary to build a new system from scratch. Once I make that decision I go all in and have a field day of building a new system to last a long time as I mentioned above so I don't have to go through the process again for a very long time. :)

That will probably never happen in our lifetimes if ever. Most software doesn't really need 64bit integer datatypes anyway let alone 128bit types (which is why Windows defaults to using 32bit ints in 64bit applications for example), and 64bits of address space is absolutely massive. I'm going from memory here, but IIRC the AMD64 architecture reserves 52 bits of the address space for physical addressing, and 2^52 is a huge number. One can use Moore's Law to estimate how long it will take for computers to utilize that much memory but it'll be quite a long time from now. Very few types of applications would ever really need that much memory though either so over time the demand to keep up with Moore's law is likely to diminish and in fact I think there are a lot of signs that its already happening in recent years.

I think if we're to see any gains from future architectures it wont be in terms of wider addressing or data busses but from the introduction of other technologies. Two such technologies that are likely to become available to us sometime in the next 5 years ago in consumer computing are having FPGAs integrated into our CPUs and GPUs which should provide enormous potential for performance boost to software able to utilize them, and memristor based storage technologies which if the technology ever actually comes out and proves itself will revolutionize the entire data storage industry. FPGAs have been around forever and Intel and AMD are already integrating them into their hardware, however memristors are one of those technologies that sound very impressive but each year they push it off another year or two because it's not yet ready or whatever.

They already have 12 and 16 core CPUs and possibly higher available but only in the business enterprise class CPUs. The reason for that is rather simple though. The types of software that run on enterprise servers parallelize very well and can thus make full use of as many cores as they can cram into a CPU. Webesrvers, mail servers, file servers and other types of services typically can scale up the number of users on a system very high depending on the amount of CPU cores, RAM and disk resources available. The only real limit is the limit of the technology itself but the software is ready to rock and roll.

Unfortunately, the type of games and applications that consumers run on home computers does not generally benefit from having a lot of cores available. Most applications are single-threaded or have a few threads but few applications and even fewer games can scale to use all cores effectively on existing consumer CPUs. Compression/decompression programs scale incredibly well and can make use of as many cores as are available pretty much, but most other applications just do not scale well if at all. So the only thing more cores really provides is the ability to have more applications running but it does not really improve the performance much of individual programs once you scale beyond 4 to 8 cores.

As such, CPU vendors are less likely to bother pushing higher core counts in their consumer oriented CPUs because consumer workloads are not massively multithreaded at this point in time. When it comes to video games in particular, most games that do spread across 4 to 8 cores of a CPU do not actually use more than 5-20% of each core's available processing power so the additional cores may benefit the system as a whole to be able to run more software more smoothly, but it doesn't really benefit individual games that much beyond 4 cores. Also, the GPU tends to be the bottleneck with modern games while the CPU is relatively idle. Case in point, when I run The Witcher 3 on my system with 2560x1600 resolution the game only uses about 20% of my CPU resources of my 8-core CPU. The GPU is the bottleneck so having 12/16/32 cores would not help this game or other games at all really.

Games just do not currently scale well to multiple cores however part of the reason for that is that the graphics APIs used to date have been largely designed for single core systems. It wasn't until recent years that this started to change with the introduction of AMD's Mantle which lead to the development of Khronos up and coming Vulkan replacement for OpenGL and Microsoft's Direct X 12. These next generation graphics APIs are designed specifically to allow for massive parallelization. That wont benefit any pre-existing games of course, but the next generation game engines that support Vulkan and/or DirectX 12 will be able to use more CPU cores simutaneously for processing and max them out more. How well that can scale is yet to be seen however so I think it's too early to guestimate if we might see future consumer chips increase the core count in the future.

Personally I think the future of performance lay more in including on-die FPGAs onto the CPU and GPU, and perhaps increasing the FPGA count over time in future generations.

Adding more cores to consumer chips right now would just make for systems with more idle cores though which doesn't really improve performance of the apps we're all running currently.

Fingers crossed for the Vulkan release announcement in January though... :)

I understand all the points you've made with the links to Microsoft and so forth but you never quite answered me if XP 32-bit with or without PAE cannot use memory above 4GB effectively then why am I able to create a 28GB Ramdrive and use it effectively if this is something that cannot be done according to you?

Second your comment about installing a pure Windows 7 64-bit isn't necessary unless you missed the fact I've been running a Multi OS boot set up.

Full Bootloader options:
DOS / 98 SE / XP 32-bit / Vista Ultimate 64-bit / Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit / Windows 8 Pro 64-bit - I got Windows 10 32 bit and 64 bit ISOs downloaded ready for the burner just haven't installed it yet and was planning to do it on a fresh system to avoid bootloader replacement or unforseen issues the Windows 10 Bootloader might cause when from experience the Windows 8 bootloader changed the Vista / W7 bootloader which annoyed me.

A Multi OS boot just allows you to choose which OS you are going to run it doesn't affect the performance of the actual OS which is what I think you might be suggesting by telling me to install only Windows 7 64-bit from scratch as a stand alone OS installation.

You have to do a lot of preparation work into considering which OSes you want and how much space to set aside for each partition not just for installing the OS but also anticipating the amount of space it may need as it grows. Also setting aside an independent partition just for redirecting the path for your Program and Data files is also key to keeping the OS partitions trim so that when you are ghosting them you don't end up backing up your program and data files on top increasing the size of your OS images.

Maybe that's why I am getting a lot of resistance from you assuming I only have access to one OS - XP 32-bit because I don't. I just use it as my primary OS user interface that is selected by default at the Boot Menu set with a 2 second timer should I choose another OS to boot on. I prefer XP because I like the speed and everything on the desktop is laid out efficiently compared to later Windows versions from W7 and onward. Classic Windows (95 / 98 / 2000) theme with Quick Launch + Clear Desktop icon is a much better experience for me then default XP, Vista, or 7 Windows user interface themes with bloated eye candy doesn't enhance my experience but just adds delay at getting to what I want to do.

Nice reference to Star Wars but "Me not seen movie yet need not be spoiler say I."

But yes aside from that there is still a whole plethora of XP software (games in particular) I haven't played due to not having bought or played them when they came out being so busy in life. Some issues of course were my P4 couldn't handle the necessary requirements to run it smoothly then and now I would have the ability to try them for the very first time in the best possible maximum settings.

As far as testing 32-bit XP games on Windows 7 64-bit. Just from googling over the years about people complaining about some XP 32-bit game not working on Vista 64-bit or Windows 7 64-bit I knew there would be issues as Windows 7 64-bit is built off different code from the ground up compared to XP 32-bit. It is like comparing Windows 98 SE with Windows 2000 Professional. Most of these games do not work on both systems unless the software company compiles it specifically to run on it. People suggesting enabling the XP compatibility tab and so forth to get it to work properly or maybe there are no options that could fix the problem and thus GOG or some fan found a way to patch it to work. I remember Bladerunner from Westwood Studios at one point didn't work on XP if I recall or it was glitchy in some areas even though it ran on XP. Sometimes these game studios go bankrupt and thus support for play on a newer OS is not available. So in that light GOG is an advantage in that area. My hope is the best DOS games that were on CD could be adapted for XP and later Windows because a lot of these had nasty CD checks built into it so you couldn't play the game w/o the CD.

Intel and AMD have had patent cross-licensing agreements since the 1980s which are still in place today and only terminate if there is a change of ownership of either company from what I recall. They don't particularly share technologies but rather they wont sue each other if they infringe upon each other's patents as I understand the agreements to be. It's probably more nuanced than that, but close enough. :)

I'm a long time proponent of AMD personally but ultimately I keep up to date from time to time on the technologies of both companies. When I make a purchase I put a lot more thought into it than the average person likely does and I'm usually looking at the best bang for the buck for doing what I personally need to do. Traditionally my research has led me to choose AMD products as a result however there have been a few times where it was close too. There are some areas where Intel has had a clear value proposition such as low-power embedded systems. The Intel Atom CPUs have much better thermal characteristics compared to AMDs options when I've looked at them for use in things like nettops for example.

Unfortunately though, as big of an AMD technology fan that I am they have one big problem going forward in my mind's eye that would be a problem for me if I were to be buying a new high end CPU today. My CPU is 125W which is a lot of power for a CPU, but AMD's newer CPUs almost need a nuclear power plant to run them, bagging in at 220W or some crazy shit. There's no way in hell I'm buying a 200+W CPU for any purpose no matter how big a fan of the company I am. :) That's just ridiculous. :)

So I'm glad I'm actually not in the market for a new CPU currently as I'm not happy with the overall state of the computer hardware market in general now. Too many overpriced products that are no longer following Moore's Law as they traditionally have for decades.

I do hope that AMD can solve the current issues though as they otherwise have decent tech. You shouldn't need to plug your computer into a 600V outlet. :)

I have to agree Intel wins in terms of TDP though.

I loaded mine with 32GB because well it was there... (the memory slots) I mean and the most memory I've ever seen. :) I wanted to see what it would feel like to have all that memory at my disposal. I came from a P4 with 1.5GB max memory limit so you can certain I wasn't going to just sit with 4GB of RAM on an Ivy Bridge and not wonder what can I do with 32GBs of RAM?

RAMdrive baby...

Unfortunately, when I first got it XP 32-bit could not create any Ramdrives except stealing from the 3GB range so basically killing yourself from running software that needed that memory so this relegated me to make only experimental small Ramdrives of 1GB at most maybe 2GB if I wanted to run in a very tight squeezed environment. Not fun!

Fast forward this year... wallah... I found the only Ramdrive that could tap into the unmanaged > 4GB memory region that was undiscovered and unused until ... NOW!

So in my view XP now gained a whole new world of tweaking that I couldn't achieve on 1.5GB of RAM on a P4.

As for my 386 Motherboard well you could say I had 8MB of Ram installed I think it had 8 Dimm slots max. Strange how the older motherboards had more memory slots than today's consumer motherboards. It would nice if they went back to that style then I could have loaded 64GB onto this with 8 x 8GB DDR3 1.35 Low Voltage RAM.

Yes I agree RAM did cost a lot back in those days... The good thing was like I said my parents had a computer store and I got the benefits of "borrowing" memory for usage. :) This included any components to build a computer from scratch. I remember even testing old Apple ][ keyboards sitting on a plain cardboard box. Not fun but after doing this hundreds and hundreds of times hitting each key one at a time and making sure the Green composite monitor registered each keystroke I learned the QWERTY keyboard layout. Didn't learn how to type with 10 fingers yet but boy was I fast with the 2 finger method!

I forgot to mention another added benefit which you may have not tapped into. Back in the early XP days a company called Connectix released Virtual PC. This allowed people to install Older OSes on XP. This included DOS (even IBM PC DOS 7.0 was included), OS /2, and Windows 95 / 98 SE with Sound Blaster sound card emulation and a very compatible emulated VGA card. I think it was a S3 ViRGE which also had Windows 3.1 and DOS drivers. So in effect OS virtualization was epitomized on XP. This was when DOSBOX had not gained ground yet and wasn't even close to prime time for DOS games. Later around Virtual PC 5.0 / 6.0 Microsoft bought Connectix. It was a sad day when I heard the news. My first thought is great they want to prevent people from running their older OS by buying them out. Well after it got branded as Microsoft Virtual PC we no longer had the Sound Blaster sound card or the very compatible VGA graphics card emulation anymore. Basically a FU to everyone who used Connectix's Virtual PC. They even branched off to make Connectix Virtual Game Station which allowed you to play Sony Playstation 1 games on a PC. So when Microsoft bought Connectix you knew you weren't going to see any more innovative ideas coming out. Damn monopoly.

As for Vista and Windows 7, well Virtual PC does exist but not in its once admired form but you can run its version of XP on it. I haven't tried it but I did download the installer. But running XP in its native form is a lot faster and more compatible so I didn't see any need to go that route. If you have ever run DOSBOX games on a P4 with XP versus running it in Pure DOS you could tell how much CPU processing power was wasted compared to running it in real DOS. Running a DOS game while in a DOS Prompt window in Windows 3.1 was the first sign of how slow it was then a real DOS on a 486. Emulation is never as fast as native nor as compatible. I did try VMware but it's lack of sound card and video compatibility that Connectix Virtual PC had was a no brainer in choice.

However in your case regarding the multiple VM environments which could be given 4GB or more memory each I can see how taxing it would be in Windows 7 64-bit as far as memory is concerned. Since you would be trying to run Vista or later OSs which may not have been anticipated and may not even work in Connectix Virtual PC in XP.

Perhaps if the RAMdrive company I'm using could adapt this unmanaged invisible memory technology into XP's memory management it would solve the dilemma. However for the purposes of using VMs in XP you would be running older OS VMs using several Connectix Virtual PC VM environments of Windows 98SE.

But given my usage, Windows 98SE can't really fully utilize much more than 64MB for the most part even though 512MB is possible without crashing the OS with a BSOD. I guess I could set aside 1.5GB of my 3.2GB XP memory = 1536MB of memory for 24 Windows 98SE VM environments and for DOS ( 1572864KB / 640KB ) = 2,457 DOS VM environments. Not bad?

Regarding your response about cores read post #100 that I did in this forum to another user previously I already mentioned the:

http://ark.intel.com/products/81061/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-2699-v3-45M-Cache-2_30-GHz

Which would give you a max of 36 cores in a dual CPU motherboard on XP.

However I was referring to the desktop consumer motherboards you can buy from places like Newegg, Fry's, Micro Center, et cetera and only recently the Socket 2011 got octocore making it interesting if you got the money.

Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition
$1000

These server class motherboards aren't going to be available to the masses or at reasonable prices and from I've seen they usually sell you an entire chassis with it preinstalled.

And unless the software is written to support that many cores most of us aren't even going to close to tapping into potential with everyday apps.

And yes most of the newer games are taxing the GPU moreso than the CPU because it's more efficient at doing those kinds of processes. So therefore that's why I like to patiently wait for the next graphics card that comes out while maintaining a high performance per watt ratio and still being low enough to be powered by the PCIe slot and if possible passively cooled while still maintaining graphics driver support for my OS as long as possible.

The 1000 generation aka Pascal may release an XP driver which I'm hoping they do another refresh on their GTX 750. Otherwise I may skip Pascal and keep waiting until the last generation nVidia to support Windows 7 64-bit before upgrading.

That's how I tackled my best and fastest Windows 98 SE compatible card to run those games as fast as possible. Even today most of the 98SE games don't run properly on XP and not all of them have been updated for XP and later except the few lucky charms we get on GOG.

As for a way to alleviate the gaming bottleneck they (Intel, nVidia, AMD) need to focus on doing the same thing they are doing with the CPUs. Building more cores or equivalent solution in GPUs and programming drivers to take advantage of that parallel processing style. LOL I just caught up to what you wrote about parallelization so we're in the same mind set. I didn't know DX 12 introduced this. That is good news. More reason to test out Windows 10 64-bit.

LOL Khronos and Vulkan - seriously? Some there is a major Trekker. Next will come Remis. (spelled incorrectly intentionally to avoid copyright infringement from Paramount).

No need, Acer is completely and perpetually cringe-worthy. :) Our local school board was replacing all of their computer hardware one year and were giving away all of the old hardware for free on a first come first serve basis. I went there and grabbed 5 PCs, 2 Acers and 3 Dells. Can't complain for free hardware though even if it sucks. hehe

AMD FX8350 8-core @ 4GHz
ASUS Sabertooth FX990 Rev 2
32GB Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz
AMD Radeon HD7850 2GB
Corsair AX850 850W PSU
3x 2TB Western Digital Caviar Black
120GB Intel 330 series SSD
Dell U3011 30" DFP @ 2560x1600 16:10
2 Dell 2405 FPW 24" @ 1920x1200 16:10

All sorts of fun fancy input hardware including:
Logitech G600 20 button mouse
Logitech G27 racing wheel
Saitek X52 Pro flight control system
Saitek Rudder pedal for X52
NaturalPoint TrackIR 4 Pro head tracker

All in all it's a pretty solid system with many years of service left to give. The weakest link right now is the GPU which will have to be upgraded at some point in the future when enough must-have games come out that finally twist my arm enough to upgrade. I'm in no rush to do that though. ;)


Nope, WINE stands for "Wine Is Not an Emulator". It doesn't emulate Windows nor run Windows inside it. There is no inside actually. Wine is simply a collection of native Linux shared libraries that implement the functionality of DLLs that come with Windows along with an abstraction layer that implements the Windows OS APIs and services to allow Windows programs to run in Linux as if they were native Linux applications. It is possible to get Wine to use individual Windows DLLs if necessary or desired, but if used those just substitute for the provided Wine shared libraries.

The only way to run Windows XP inside Linux is to run it inside a virtual machine such as KVM, VirtualBox or VMware similar to how you'd do the same thing in Windows. If you wanted to run something like Windows on non-x86 hardware like a PS3 then you'd need to run it inside a virtual machine that also implements CPU emulation such as QEMU. I'm not sure if QEMU can do that for a PS3 or not, would have to look up the PS3 specs and QEMU support matrix. I have used QEMU's CPU emulation to emulate x86 hardware before though and while it is fascinating it is also incredibly slow and practically useless for something like video games. :)

For games, one would want to use Wine or one of the 3rd party spinoffs/forks of it, or a virtual machine running Windows however 3D acceleration is practically a non-starter inside virtual machines.

Just virtual machines.

Indeed. It's not a time that I look forward to, but it's not for another 3.5 years or so that I need to be overly concerned about it per se either. I'm increasingly disenfranchised by Microsoft's new Windows releases and so I think there is a pretty good chance Windows 7 may be my last Microsoft operating system. A lot can happen in 4 years time but if I had to estimate what the most viable solution will be for myself in 4 years, it will probably be to migrate as many applications, games etc. to Linux at that juncture if I haven't migrated most of it already, to try to get as many games as I care about to run in Linux under Wine/WineX/Crossover/etc. and if I keep a running Windows 7 system for anything that I'm unable to do in Linux easily then that Windows 7 system will end up disconnected from the Internet and either air-gapped or heavily firewalled from the Internet and have restricted LAN-only network access.

It's possible ReactOS might be able to be used for something then perhaps also but I probably doubt it. :)

We're seeing an influx of games being ported to Linux or made to work in some manner or another in Linux too so 4 years from now we might find a crap tonne of them available.

Either way though, I for one am not too worried about it in the short term, but I don't look forward to it in the long term either. :)