On April 9, 2003, Microsoft officially announced that it would support AMD's then-upcoming 64-bit Opteron and Athlon 64 microprocessors with 64-bit native versions of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. The news must have sent shivers down the spines of executives at Microsoft partner Intel, whose 64-bit Itanium product line has languished because of slow performance and incompatibilities with today's existing 32-bit software. For AMD, of course, it was--and still is--a major victory. Not only was the one time microprocessor also-suddenly getting equal press from Microsoft as Intel, within a year, Intel shocked the world by announcing that it would essentially ape AMD's designs and create 64-bit versions of the Xeon and Pentium 4 CPUs that would be code compatible. The follower had suddenly become the leader.