Good-bye Mr. 32-bit – you aren’t big enough for this school yard… I have been telling clients for the past year that any future hardware they purchase (in relation to SharePoint) should be 64-bit. Why? Because the vNext was going to only be 64-bit; this has been documented in different places but now it’s official.
What I didn’t see coming was that Windows Server 2008 (64-bit) was going to be required, but now that I actually think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Running a 2010 server product on a 2003 server would be silly.
Get all of the details from the SharePoint Team Blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint/archive/2009/05/07/announcing-sharepoint-server-2010-preliminary-system-requirements.aspx