Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 9

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/10/week-in-microsoft-windows-7-windows-8-windows-9.ars

by nreece • 17 years ago

15 16 17 years ago

zyb09• 17 years ago

can anyone explain to me, why we need an 128-Bit OS anytime soon? I thought the problem with 32bit was mostly about memory address space and 64bit solved that issue for good.

alexgartrell• 17 years ago

Just going off the deep end, what if you ran an entire server farm as a single OS instance? It's certainly an interesting model for a distributed system, but I don't know how practical it is.

Even then, I don't see anyone getting 3.16 * 10^29 gigs of ram, so maybe it's just more marketing?

wyday• 17 years ago

Because processor technologies aren't designed the weekend before they're shipped. AMD's x86-64 technology (aka 64-bit) was publicly announced in 1999 (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit). It likely was in planning stages years earlier.

When was the first time you needed x64? (i.e. when did you run into the 4GB ram wall?) This year, maybe. Last year at earliest. That's more than a 10 year gap from when a technology was conceived and when it was needed.

oomkiller• 17 years ago

Well, according to Wikipedia, 32 bit architectures started to come around in the 60s. We reached the 32-bit memory wall in some applications at earliest 1990. Thats 30 years to go between the first 32-bit archs and the "topping out of them." Then, you need to remember that this is an exponential change in address space, not a linear one. 2^64 is MUCH MUCH bigger than 2^32, you can't just think of it as "twice as much." In the 60s, they thought 4 billion bytes would be much more than they would ever need, but 32 bit's headroom was just 1000 times more than the biggest they used in that day (assuming 4MB, even though IBM's System/360 could access 8MB, which in that case the headroom would only be 500 times as much memory). 64 bit tops out at about 17.2 billion GB, and if we estimate that today's common RAM size is 2GB, the headroom we have for 64 bit is about 8.6 billion times what most computers have commonly today. That means that the headroom for 64 bit is 8.6 MILLION times the headroom that was in 32-bit. For some reason I think that it will take us much longer to fill up 64-bit than it did for us to use up 32-bit.

yosh• 17 years ago

Huh? Plenty of things needed more than 4 GB RAM in the 1990s. Scientific and database applications, to name a couple examples. That's why IBM, Sun, HP, SGI, DEC, etc. were all shipping 64-bit machines then. There were also a lot of contortions implemented to make >4 GB happen on 32-bit Intel machines too.

What AMD did (and Intel subsequently copied) with x86-64 was to significantly drop the price of 64-bit capable hardware, to the point where it shipped on personal workstations which didn't really need it then.

InclinedPlane2• 17 years ago

Keep in mind that the x86-64/amd64 architecture also added a lot of other architectural improvements (like additional registers) and the processors supported running unmodified native x86 code much, much faster than the 32-bit only processors of the time. 5 years ago, if you wanted the absolute fastest x86 machine possible your best bet was to get a dual Opteron (amd64) system and just put a 32-bit OS on it. Running actual 64-bit apps also showed a significant speed improvement, regardless of ram usage.

This performance improvement, more so than the ability to address more than 4gb of memory, is the primary reason for 64-bit processing becoming mainstream, in my opinion.

Devilboy• 17 years ago

From what I understand 128-bit is for HDD allocation purposes only. Memory allocation / everything else will stay 64 bit. Very large disk storage units is looking like it will challenge the 64-bit architecture in the coming years - for the heaviest users.

barrkel• 17 years ago

64 bits can only address about 4GB on about 4 billion computers.

If you were to hypothesize a globally distributed object oriented system where objects can migrate / replicate from one machine to another, a 64-bit virtual memory space would be insufficient.

daeken• 17 years ago

128-bit addressing is great and all, but it's completely useless (for the near future) unless we have finer-grained pagetables. Give me the ability to do very, very fine-grained pages (let me bring it down to 16 bytes if i want to) and suddenly a lot of new things open up. For a long time, I've been thinking about representing 3d data spatially in memory using virtual memory mapping, but the granularity of existing systems makes it extremely inefficient.

InclinedPlane2• 17 years ago

This whole "128-bit windows 8" story has to be the dumbest piece of "reporting" I've seen in a while.

Firstly, who is even working on 128-bit processors? Secondly, what is the source for this news? At best the hint of a rumor. Thirdly, what industry need does 128-bit processors satisfy?

All around it points to a lack of critical thinking and skepticism, if not straight up naivete, gullibility, and ignorance bordering on incompetence on the part of the "reporters".

This line strikes me as amusing: "Consequently, the company [MS] is also forming relationships with major partners, including Intel, AMD, HP, and IBM." Newsflash: MS already has close relationships with each of those companies. There are many "business partners" from each of those companies who effectively work on the Microsoft campus.

At best this "revelation" is about the Itanium processor (which uses 128-bit instructions, though it retains a 64-bit word length and address space), in which case it is not only boring but horribly misleadingly recharacterized.

timdorr• 17 years ago

Reminds me when consoles went from 8-bit to 16-bit to 32-bit to 64-bit and then sort of stopped (Dreamcast mentioned that it was 128-bit for a bit). Sounds like the author of this article is a bit nostalgic for his former console days.

bvttf• 17 years ago

I'd have guessed IA-128 was Itanium, as IA-64 was, but google seems to think this article is the only authority on IA-128.

vinutheraj• 17 years ago

I personally liked this one - Symantec sponsored a study by Dennis Technology Lab which concluded that Norton Antivirus 2009 is superior to Microsoft Security Essentials in on-demand scans as well as real-time protection.

Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 9

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