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Projected 'Average' Longhorn System Is A Whopper
greg_barton writes "At first I thought this was a joke, but this article from Microsoft Watch confirms it: 'Microsoft is expected to recommend that the 'average' Longhorn PC feature a dual-core CPU running at 4 to 6GHz; a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM; up to a terabyte of storage; a 1 Gbit, built-in, Ethernet-wired port and an 802.11g wireless link; and a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today.'"
The first full-fledged beta isn't due out until sometime in 2005
I don't see anything wrong with these specs. Next year well be in the 4 GHz range and my system today has 2 @ $150 gig memory which isn't a bunch either, Gigabit Ethernet is on ~2/3ds of the mommaboards today, Moore's law will take care of tripling the video processor over the next few years, AMD is kicking butt with their 64 bit chip so Intel will get it's 64bit ready for the masses, if you're not running 802.11g then great you can upgrade to wireless SuperG @108Mbps. When long horn comes out in ~2006 than I imagine this will be the average system. MS is making quite good estimates on the intended consumer. But then you read that a dual processor machine is on the horizon makes me wonder if LongHorn isn't targeted for desktops.
When you're a subscriber, you get the story early, and you also get the line:
Well, Duh!
Let's see now: 1TB of storage is the thing that stands out. I've been running a dual CPU machine with 4GB of RAM for a while now, but 1 TB of storage, what the hell for ?
I've just commissioned a dual opteron 248 (2.2 GHz) , 8 GB of RAM, 1TB of disk with a 3ware 9500 raid controller (I'll post benchmarks soon if anyone's interested - I can't find any on the net but it promises 400MB/sec sequential raid-5 reads. We'll see...) This is far and away the most powerful machine I've ever ordered, and it doesn't meet the Longhorn 'average'... Something smells...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Microsoft will not survive if it keeps making larger and larger demands of the hardware market. People, Businesses, Universities, and others will not be able to afford to upgrade their systems to use Longhorn. Not to mention they will lose their largest market, PC manufactures who make up the majority of their business.
That's why the smarter people use Firefox.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
those specs are not surprising. If you look at today's "Average" PC and factor in 6 years of technological progress that seems to be what most people will think of as upper middle range in 2010.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
This may be modded as funny. But even 2008 seems too early for these kind of specs. Give me a break, 2GB of RAM and 1 terabyte of disk space. It's rediculous. Computer retailer's are still shipping computers with 256MB of RAM and 40GB hard disks.
It probably won't be uncommon for that much RAM to be in a machine by 2008, but 1 Terabyte disk space seems a little rediculous. And longhorn is suppose to by release like early 2006 isn't it?
I'm not convinced that this article is for real.
If these specs are correct, Microsoft is making a major tactical mistake. The computer market is driven by early adopters, but the bread-and-butter is still in the business market. The average business still has P3s running around, or even older. Even with the average upgrade cycle, but 2006 what's cutting edge now will be the average. Even with Moore's law Longhorn will require far more resources than the average business machine.
If Microsoft ships with those specs as a baseline, 2/3rds of their business customers will say now. If Microsoft demands they switch or lose support, they'll end up switching to Linux (which by then will have made significant inroads as a business desktop OS).
I can't imagine this story being true. As much as I dislike Microsoft, they're not that foolish to release an OS that most businesses can't afford to buy. Even XP can run (albeit slowly) on a two or three year old machine. If Longhorn can't run on today's machines it needs to be streamlined until it does.
The requirements always sound ridiculous when they announce them. By the time the O/S is available, it's usually just about affordable for desk-top, and possibly making an announcement now has an effect of pushing the price of hardware down, as manufacturers know how much people are prepared to pay for hardware.
:)
The price in $ for a nice fast PC has fallen quite slowly, but you definitely get more for your money now....
I like running desk-top linux on hardware that never needs to use it's swap file
RG
Slashdot is no better than Simone:
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
You're wrong on both counts. Application startup depends most on hard drive speed and certainly has nothing to do with the amount of ram you have unless you don't have enough and you have to swap to virtual memory. Last time I checked even Mozilla didn't take up more than 35mb of ram and the most I've seen it go up to with multiple tabs on my machine is about 70mb.
The 3ghz cpu makes some difference, but it's mostly hard drive speed. And it's certianly not ram. 256 is enough if you're just running a modern OS and Mozilla.
Right now, the average home user is probably close to a 500 mHz Celeron. The average new XP machine might within shouting distance of a 3.0 GHz P4, sure.
Thus Microsoft's estimate of the average Longhorn machine sounds plausible.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
There must be people who are, today, trying to run the pre-alpha Longhorn for testing etc. Not only are they doing it on sub-standard hardware (by Longhorn standards), but much of the code will not yet have been optimised*, and would run unacceptably slowly even on that dual 5GHz/2Gb machine.
I'm glad I don't have that job.
* No, I don't have inside information, just experience at the software development cycle. For anything this complicated, the early development versions run too slowly.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
First, I'm going to take this "scoop" with a grain of salt. It's being brought to us by the same biased nerds who continually try to slam Longhorn with as much unsubstantiated FUD as they possibly can. My favorite involves the Longhorn release date. All over Slashdot all I see are cries of "2008" for the release. I seem to remeber it being 2006 for a release, 2007 at latest. My memory might be slighly fuzzy in that regard, but if someone can provide me with a definitive link stating "Longhorn no earlier than 2008", I'll be happy. Otherwise, I'm convinced that in 2005 Slashdot geeks will be yelling "no Longhorn until 2009", etc. At any rate, I'm not buying these specs. They are quite ridiculous, and it seems unlikely that the Longhorn developers could be getting any work accomplished with modern-era PCs if Longhorn is expected to be such a hog.
Now the second point: does anyone remember all the big flap over the story that Windows 98 was going to require (gasp) 200MB of hard drive space? Who could forget... "200MB for an OS! That's ridiculous", etc. Of course, everyone forgets that at around the same time, Linux had similar HD requirements. And when XP was set to be released, bitching and moaning about the expected 1GB install (or thereabouts), when modern Linux distros installed to roughly the same size. Time marches on, and OS requirements will climb because modern OS's will be expected to do more and more hardware-taxing things. The minimum recommended specs for a modern version of Redhat would look downright bloated to just about any computer user of 3 or 4 years ago, so keep that in mind. Windows will require beefier hardware, and so will Linux. This sort of behavior is not limited strictly to Windows.
Nothing to see here, just more geek hypocrisy...
The upside is that all those people buying ubercomputers just cause MS tells them to brings the price of powerful hardware down, so that those of us running non-bloaty operating systems get better performance for cheaper. It's not like this is going to stop poor people from buying computers, hell there will be plenty of powerful used computers hitting the market. I'm sure the figures aren't just for the operating system alone either. They're factoring in the apps of tomorrow too. All in all, I don't see how this is a big deal.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
As long as I can tweak it so the "upgraded" interface looks as much like a bare bones Win95 system as possible, and I can turn off all the "friendly" background tasks to make it actually responsive, I'm happy. I like my processor working on my tasks, not needless graphical widgets, thanks.
Visit the
seriously
You have a very skewed concept of "average", good sir. Too much time on Slashdot. That might be the average system being SOLD today, as in right this second, but that's far from the average system in peoples' homes. "Average" users don't buy a new system every year, and 3.0 GHz wasn't the average when they bought systems 2, 3, 4 years ago.
Nor is there an application today that the "average user" requires that needs 3.0 GHz. The "average user" may be playing with digital photos more, but they don't require maximum Photoshop performance. Slicing their picture cropping time from 4 seconds to 2 seconds isn't worth hundreds or even a couple thousand dollars to Joe Average In Less Than Optimum Economical Times.
I know we can expect hardware performance to improve substantially in the next three years, but COME ON! what are they trying to achieve here? What problems do I have with my computer that this solution is going to fix?
Ten years ago (pre-win95), if you asked me what my 5 major computing problems were, I'd have said:
1. Memory management - need a flat model with real 32 bit support
2. Standardized driver and hardware support, especially for printers.
3. Long File Names.
4. Standardized install/uninstall support.
5. Performance - hardware needs to be faster.
Well, a year or two years later, we've got all of them.
So, what are my top five today?
1. Spam
2. Viruses and Spyware
3. Every software vendor on the planet wants me to send them money every year even though I'm happy with what I've got. (See: license keys and forced registration/activiation.)
4. Tech IP (Patents).
5. Vendor lock-in.
ONE... **ONE** of those (#2) is a problem software can fix. and FOUR of them are *CAUSED* *INTENTIONALLY* by Microsoft and companies just like them.
I am not the only one who's soured on MS just because I'm tired of putting up with the crap. The corp world is moving, too.
I also think MS is in more trouble than they let on. They feel their grip on the monopoly rope slipping and rather than letting go and trusting that they can compete in an open world, they are forcing themselves to be the only player in a smaller and smaller box.
BTW, Knoppix 3.5(?) came out today. It now supports my NForce2 audio and net card correctly in the default configuration, and it makes NO demands of me beyond making me look at pictures of penguins.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
True. Gaming is the only thing driving CPU speeds these days. For everything else, computers are fast enough.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
If Longhorn ran on current "mainstream" PCs, Microsoft would be in trouble. Assuming that current PCs cost $600, in a couple of years, this will drop to $250. This would make Longhorn >50% of the price of the PC. The only way to keep the OS price hidden is to push the total hardware price up. Otherwise, people will realize that the Microsoft tax actually exists.
You expect /.ers to be accurate and honest while bashing Windows/MS/Bill Gates/Steve Ballmer?
I'd say, "you must be new," but your UID is too low.
I'm not so sure. I think hardware makers are going to find it hard to sell this stuff when there's no demand for it.
Yes, but there will be demand when Microsoft tells the hardware manufacturers that the only way they will be allowed to maintain the OEM agreement is by selling machines exclusively with Longhorn installed...
the above is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect that of the little voices in my head
Amen to that. No way businesses will spend thousands to upgrade their hardware just to be able to run new OS, no matter how amazing Soitaire it's got.
Remember when OS/2 Warp 4.0 came out? It had fewer requirements than the 3.0 version! Without sacrificing any features or performance!
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
There is another interpretation of why Longhorn might be so large, which is this: keeping as much functionality as possible under the hood means that the "single" operating system can be seen as efficient as possible, and will have as few rivals as possible.
This is similar to the case of when Internet Explorer became an integral part of the operating system. Now we all know that a browser is fundamentally a separate piece of the pie, but by including the functionality of IE, MS manages to exclude as much competition as possible.
I imagine that a lot of the operating system will be functions that sweeten the GUI performance.
If the legal cases over software provision are to have any effect, they really need to lay down the separation of the development of software into distinct modules in the case where there is clear monopoly abuse.
For example, it would be possible to instruct MS to supply Longhorn with a minimal GUI (and no IE) with a published GUI API/Protocol so that other developers could easily compete with the provision of GUI related software.
About 2 years ago, I broke the "continuous upgrade cycle". I still play games - Quake III Arena mostly, UT2004, Flight Sim 2004, Dark Age of Camelot - on Windows XP with an Athlon 1500XP+, a GeForce 3 Ti500, 512MB of RAM, and a 40GB drive. I also do 'serious amateur' (25-50MB images) with Photoshop, and have MS Outlook running pretty much 90% of the time. Currently dual booting with XP is Fedora Core 2 Test 3, using Evolution, Mozilla, a couple terminal sessions, a Terminal Services connection, and the Bluefish editor.
For those requirements, this machine is perfectly adequate. Sure, my Photoshop could get stuff done faster. Sure, my frame rates in my games could be higher. But fuck, for most everything I do anymore, it's perfectly acceptable.
When this machine won't keep up with the games I want to play, or the programs I need to work with, then I'll pony up for a new one.
Most folks I work with/for are still on Pentium II or III machines, with 256MB of RAM being "a TON of memory, dude!"
"If there's hope, it lies in the proles..."
And not everyone is a graphic artist or engineer. I'm an engineer, and while my machine does have 4G of memory, it also has dual 1 GHz Xeons, and if it has any 3D hardware, the Linux version I'm using doesn't use it. The only time I notice any limitations is when I run too many Modelsim simulations at once.
Most office computer users are bean-counters, secretaries, powerpoint-using middle managers, etc. These people do NOT need 3D graphics, 4G of RAM, or 3 GHz CPUs. What's more, their companies are not going to give them this hardware just because MS's latest OS recommends it. Intel and MS are already having severe problems with their quarterly results because businesses are now extending their computer upgrade cycles from the customary 3 years to 5 years or more, despite Wintel's desperate cries of how much "productivity" they're losing by not equipping secretaries with 3 GHz processors so they can run Word faster. Businesses, which drive a huge portion of computer sales (probably the largest portion), have finally wised up to the fact that they don't need to change computers so often, and unless Intel/MS make some changes to their business models which until now have depended on frequent upgrades (expanding into China is one tactic, though it's not working so well for MS because of piracy), they're going to be hurting.
Video editing.
Trust me, you can never -- never -- have enough RAM, disk, or CPU when doing this. And people need to do this; home movies/videos are painfully boring unless chopped down to the interesting bits.
(I just dread the period we'll inevitably go through with video editing analogous to the DTP (remember DTP?) "use all the fonts!" era. It'll be the same thing, only 100 times as annoying.)
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Wouldn't it be better if the cost of the average computer came down instead of the minimum hardware spec going up?
If the cost of the hardware came down too much, you might notice that you are paying a huge chunk of the price to Microsoft. Keep the cost of the hardware high and Microsoft's cut gets lost in the static.
I agree...
In all honesty, if windows 98 could now(maybe with the latest unofficial SP) be shipped in a secure way, that played modern games somewhat well, it would likely never need to be replaced...
I mean, security aside, the ONLY reason people upgraded their home machines from 98se was newer machines, promises of better security(that XP did bring, not ME though), etc.
98se with stability improvements and bugfixes(both huge tasks, but a third edition could have been it) could have been the last OS home machines needed.
Heck, 2000 was, in most ways, the last OS business es needed.
Not to burst your bubble, but the article was written by JonKatz.
Since when has that man ever been bringer of exacting knowledge?
What you're saying is that the average computer owned by the average person is going to have those stats in 2 years.
/.'er here, we're talking about everyday non-tech-obsessed people.
You are out of your mind.
I don't dispute that those stats will exist, but I strongly dispute the assertion that the average person will feel the need to have a computer with them. We're not talking the average
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
What's even worse is that Intel's chips are getting more inefficient with every generation. If they made P3s and P4s at the same clock speed, the P3 would blow the P4 away. Some of the higher-end P3s were faster then the first P4s which had a higher clock speed. Itanium is even worse. It has an insanely long pipeline and a mis-predicted branch can cause it to waste hundreds of clock cycles on a single instruction ...
Why do you think a 1.4Ghz Opteron beats a 2.8Ghz P4 in many benchmarks?
At the risk of getting modded offtopic, I think the trend in CPUs is going to change dramatically soon, much the same way it has with video cards. Except, in a slightly different direction. Instead of getting faster, the direction they need to be going is getting less expensive to produce, less power requirements, and less heat output.
If I go nuts and decide to open every program on my machine, or listen to my whole mp3 collection at the same time, while lens flaring every photo I've ever taken, I don't want to wait. Ever.
I may be using extreme examples, but the OS should be instant. I'm still amazed at what BeOS can do on 233 pentium. Why can't today's Windows do that? Why won't tomorrow's? Why does it take 20 minutes to copy a 14 meg file on my OS X machine.
Instant. Now. I want it now, and I want it yesterday. Specs be dammed.
If you will note, the story gives the source of the minimum specs as:
"developer sources close to the company"
So if the author article defines "developer" and "close" as loosely as she did "source", this little tidbit of minimum specification could could have come from pretty much anywhere.
It's worthless anti-MS FUD like this, backed up by absolutely no journalistic integrity that tarnishes the image of slashdot.
To blog is sublime
A kernel mode driver is devinately not the same thing as the kernel itself; http.sys is part of IIS, ntoskrnl.exe is the kernel. Just because Linux likes to compile everything into one monolithic file...
Actually, it may well be if Microsoft's vision for the future of computing comes to be. I am too lazy to pull the links, but Microsoft has made clear on numerous occasions that they are betting heavily on the multimedia convergence. So they probably expect that Longhorn will be powering these Media storage center/Tivo/web utility/TV/home monitor/kitchen sink computers that they believe will be the norm in 5 years.
And I half think they are correct.
Add in some of the UI improvements that are likely to come down the pike (verbal control, facial recognition, a computer generated face on your computer screen to interact with, etc) and the video card requirements (think real time near photo quality rendering) become more sane. The hard drive is required for the media storage, and the processor is needed for the human interaction, video encoding (though this will likely be handled by special hardware, likely in the video card), etc. I can't figure what the need for so much RAM is, though it could be to have an exceptionally large disk cache as the OS and apps will be very real time oriented and thus more heavily affected by swapping to disk. And of course the networking is to transfer large media streams to all the network connected media devices, etc, and wireless is central to Microsoft's pervasive computing initiatives (see research.microsoft.com).
So, yeah, I see the OS driving a demand for these machines.
Of course, I also see Microsoft releasing a lower end OS for the rest of the world.
Oh, was that my outside voice?
Is that math really that bad, or am I sleepy? It should read:
1995: 133 Mhz
1998: 400 Mhz (200% faster)
2000: 1500 Mhz (233% faster)
2002: 2800 Mhz (90% faster)
2004: 3400 Mhz (20% faster)
Also, you're not top of the line with 3.4Ghz. With 4Ghz the numbers are better, but yeah, Motorola's not the only company with some Moore's Law problems.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
I tried starting three web browsers on this machine (MacOS X 10.3, 256MB RAM, 933 MHz G4 iBook). Just for laughs.
Internet Explorer 5.2 -- 5 seconds
Firefox 0.8 -- 6 seconds
Safari 1.2.1 -- 11 seconds
What does this tell me? More or less nothing, because, in the first place, I only start a browser once a day, if that. In the second, Firefox has bugs and IE just doesn't do tabs. So, frankly, load time isn't important.
And while I was at it, I made them all display a series of miscelaneous sites. Safari shaves seconds off the time the other two take. So I guess load time REALLY DOESN'T MATTER.
Basically, they're saying that no current consumer PC will be able to run Longhorn. Given recent trends, it's not unreasonable to expect that most/all consumer hardware will ship with embedded DRM capabilities. Is this not exactly what MS wants?
Who doesn't like free music?
Moore's law predicts approx. double every 18 months, nowadays we are looking at avg 2~4GHz CPUs, so by 2007, it should be avg. 8~16GHz.
800GB harddisks shall have the price of today's 200GB.
But then, what is that pair of 16GHz CPUs doing during that whole 1 minute boot? Trying to detect non-existance plug and play hardware? Scanning and analysing your harddisk for traces of evidents of using privated MS software/childpron/linux distros? Uploading your My Documents folder to the MS CRM server for analysis for better-customer-support? Waiting to get authorization-to-use(tm) from the forever-under-DDOS Microsoft server?
Dude, you are apparently new to the big wide world of testing products for companies like Microsoft.
People who do this refer to themselves as beta testers, irrespective of the actual level the software is at.
This goes back a longgg time.
I mean, when was the last time you heard someone refer to themselves as an alpha tester? Sure, it might happen... but it is nowhere near as common as "beta tester"
Consider an HDTV feed:
~20megabits/second would fill a 1TB disk in under a week (4.6 days).
If computers become media centers, then 1 TB media center would be fairly stifling (compared to my 300 hour Tivo).
Gigabit ethernet is similarly explained. If you want a couple video feeds to coexist, 100mbit won't cut it.
Multiple cpus is a no brainer. CPUs are running out of steam; the road to better performance is multiple cpus. It's inevitable, and 5GHz is really a very modest increase in clockspeed over today.
Save your post and reread it in 4 years and feel a bit embarassed!
Why don't you just restart your browser each day? And there can be no good reason to keep 40 tabs open. Face it, it not the browser, its you.
Because most of us dont want to settle to restarting an App every day or reformating every month. We don't want cheap windows workarounds, we want software that works.
with all the viruses, worms and spyware/adware spreading around these days, ppl. need such computing power to play solitaire with no lag O_o.
Won't somebody please think of the Karma!
Wait 'til you have kids. Then you'll be right into the home video and video editing.
Oh yes? Which "popular press"? Or do you mean, like everyone else, that you've heard it was "reported in the popular press of the time"? Don't you think that in all the years that this sily statement has been going around that someone might produce an actual citation? NO ONE EVER HAS. It comes up at Slashdot often enough. How many tens of thousands of geeks read this -- if any one had the ability and desire to prove this, some reader here would.
While what you say is true, companies will buy the computers available at the time when the old PC's break down.
So, if in 2006 (or maybe 2007 when companies start releasing all their PC's with Longhorn) the PC makers only sell PC's with 2GB RAM and a terrabyte of space, that's what businesses will buy.
They won't NEED it to do word processing, but they WILL need it if they want to keep using Microsoft.
I'm sure MS will have some "gotcha" in Longhorn that will make it difficult to avoid. They will probably stop releasing versions of Office and their other products that run on older windows. Kinda like how Office 2003 won't run on 98 and you can't buy Office XP anymore.
Gosh, you gotta love a good monopoly...
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Good points, but... there will always be groups of users that want/need/demand faster and faster performance -- this ulitmately drives the never ending Ghz wars. To say "games can't get much more realistic (and don't really need to)", isn't really fair. For the hardcore gamer, games can't be realistic enough - they'll always be willing to buy the latest hw - so they can run their directx12 games at 2048x1536 with 32xAA and all the eye-candy and get 250fps; similar to the group of users who edit massive digital images and video -- one of them posted earlier, "you can never *never* have too much ram/cpu..." Average users don't need the latest and greatest; the groups I speak of will never settle for average systems. snp
Because most of us dont want to settle to restarting an App every day or reformating every month. We don't want cheap windows workarounds, we want software that works.
/. users, and we aren't the normal buch (in terms of quantity) :)
I don't disagree with your point, I'm just feeding...
Most of us means
However, with CAP H....
The reality is that you do drive a car that requires oil change every 3000 miles or the dirt will kill it. Engine rebuild every 70,000 miles. AKA, VW Aircooled engine circa 1969.
Computers still have a LONG wan to go, horn or not.
Regardless of what the 'average jo/joe' user wants he/she either deals with the (current++) reality or not. Not == moves on to something else (other than computers; GOTO ELSE).
No, we don't. Not all of us, anyway.
Sure, it's nice to drag the bottom end along to a higher standard... but the thing you overlook is that, many times, even the top end doesn't need that standard.
In my shop, I've got 50 odd machines, and 43 of them are toasters. The users use exactly 3 applications - internal email (no internet); a custom app that lets them answer the phone and transcribe info from a caller; and a custom app that lets them manage the results of that call. And, oh yeah... 3 of that 43 will occasionally make a spreadsheet, consisting entirely of static cells.
That's it. That's all they do, and that's all they WILL do. We don't want added complexity - literally, people can die if our stuff screws up. And quite frankly, a 486 is overkill for this.
Instead, I'm being force-fed a piece of crap that's so complex, noone can manage it. The first 12 hours of box's life will be me, uninstalling AOL, MSN, OE, Media Player, and all the other crap that is nothing more than an exploit vector if I'm lucky. How I spent my past week? $35k for a rack mounted box, no keyboard or video... and it has Solitare on it. It has IE on it. It has a cute little wizard that'll help me setup MSN as my dialup ISP. This, in a quad-homed box that'll have 3 fractional DS3s on it. Yep, the inclusion of NetMeeting on this thing really made my day, and thank god OE keeps getting reinstalled every time I patch.
So... no, sir... the potential "new development" argument doesn't fly. It is rarely appropriate, and it is pretty much responsible for the bulk of the MS exploits running around today. Unknown, unneeded, and therefore unmanaged features that are not needed by that specific install. Look at the exploits running around, look at who keeps "catching" them and why... it's all caused by these "new developments" being force-fed in an environment where these developments are *not* appropriate, and in fact not needed. I had to patch against a MIDI file exploit, on a rack mounted box with no sound card. Huh??!! Then consider that I had to patch my neighbor's box against Sasser... a box that has only a single NIC connected to a cable modem. No file sharing, etc, is needed by that user... and the user doesn't want it. Yet, we still have to manage it, even though it has no business existing in that install. You'll find that the bulk of the Sasser victims are a similar case, and this case is caused by unwanted, unknown, and therefore unmanaged features.
Consider how irrelevent most firewalls would be if this were NOT the case.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
Something is really wrong with your math. You should be considering FLOPS or some other measure of speed.
Mhz to MHz comparisons are only valid within the same generation of CPU
You ignore the changes in chip generations. A Pentium I chip @ 75Mhz is FASTER than a 486 chip running @ 75mhz. An alpha EV56 is faster than an EV5 at the same clock frequency.
Just look at AMD vs Intel if you want a current example of how clock speed isn't the only factor.
Moore's law deals with the overall speed of the processor NOT the clock frequency.
Ummm, no. When a game on the scale of Vice City can run and look like the D3 screenshots, then maybe you'd have a point. But my understanding is that the D3 can only have a handful of baddies on the screen before it gets unplayable. And even then, that looks nothing like real life. Obviously games will need to look different than real-life--who wants to shoot (seemingly) real people? But regardless, games still have a long way to go until it reaches the point where the graphics are 100% mature.
Nothing you can do to a word processor will require more processing power than a current "average" machine offers.
Fair enough: I certainly don't need dual processors to write a letter to my grandma. But more computational power will open up more possibilities: voice-to-text that doesn't suck; real-time (as in >24 Hz) internet video chat; advanced data-mining; etc. I mean, if we're shooting for pure bare-bones functionality, bust our your 486s, cuz that worked fine for me.
It is a good point that there is a lag in software catching up to hardware, but it will catch up. For the past year, my 9700 Pro has basically been able to handle with ease any and all games thrown at it. But soon, with HL2, D3, and so on, it's really gonna start to chug. Another example: think of how long it takes to transfer files from a floppy to your HDD. Now think of how long it takes to rip a CD. Wouldn't you be willing to pay a pretty penny to make those two times equivalent?
If these requirements aren't really needed then it's just a marketing plan to encourage adoption. If the accounting department budgets for these massive upgrades an IT department will upgrade more machines (rather than tell accounting "No we really don't need all that money") which of course will lead to faster and wider adoption than just the "cutting edge" which they budgeted for. It will make Microsoft and everyone's IT department's look like they are saving massive amounts of money.
If these requirements are really used, it'll be to support the huge DRM encryption and decryption lock-ins at all levels of the computer hardware. This makes things like DVD's and CD's lower cost on Windows. But If everything is encrypted, your data will be locked in as well and you'll be glad to pay whatever "protection fee" MS markets (in the form of service plans and OS upgrades) because you'll have no other way to get use your own data.
I put Windows Server 2003 on a PII 233. It ran fine.
You can run XP on a slow CPU. Performance is much more dependant on:
- Non crappy graphics (with a good driver)
- Enough memory (at least 256M)
The grandparent is not flamebait. It is a valid comment. I ran Whistler (XP Beta) on my Celeron 233 with 192M of memory for years.
I ran Windows 98 on a Pentium 75 system with 32M of memory. It ran OK (not great, but it was usable).
Remember, XP runs like crap if:
- You don't have enough memory
- Your graphics card/drivers are crap
That's why you should always get a system with an ATI/NVIDIA graphics card (chip). It is unbelieveable how much faster the 4MB ATI Rage in my notebook is than the "Intel Integrated" graphics in my friend's (much newer) notebook (note, this is for 2D, not 3D - the Rage sucks in 3D, not that the Intel doesn't).
Of course its marketing strategy. Hardware vendors will help to push the new windows os forward, to increase sale of new systems. If it would not create demand for faster computers, computer vendors would instead push towards linux to lower cost. Only by increasing the 'demand' in some way, ms$ can sell windows.
That's not so dumb, underneath it all. It will get to the point where in order to get something done, it will be figured out how to 'trick' the universe into doing things like this.
I mean, there's already been a mathematician or two who've done mathematical proofs (or at least theorems or somesuch, I'm not a mathematician) that warp travel ala Star Trek is possible - the ship is still doing less than light speed inside a warp bubble. As far as the universe would be concerned, that ship hasn't broken any rules of physics.
Thoughts influence feelings. Feelings influence thought. Choose your thoughts wisely.
dual-core CPU running at 4 to 6GHz; a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM; up to a terabyte of storage; a 1 Gbit, built-in, Ethernet-wired port and an 802.11g wireless link; and a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today
Well, MacOS X 10.3 currently has most of the things Microsoft is promising with Longhorn (e.g., hardware accelerated GUI), and my Powerbook "only " has a 1GHz processor, 256MB of RAM, and 30 GB HD space...
It's already said the avrage person will not need a "top of the line" PC unless they play video games.
Nothing used in the office or Internet today needs such power.
So why dose Longhorn need so much processing power? Obveously those requirements are not for the apps. Most of that is needed by the OS itself.
So what is planned for Longhorn that it needs such resources?
And more importantly....
Can we do it in Linux TODAY?
What I'm saying is that's a lot of features and I'm sure there are a lot of potental Linux projects in that. If Microsoft is going to tell us what Longhorn will be doing years from now maybe we could recreate those features in Linux TODAY as sepret projects.
(Of course you couldn't install them ALL at once but if you had only what you wanted installed you wouldn't need anywhere near as much as Longhorn will)
I don't actually exist.
CPU designers are already dealing with propagation speed issues. Have been doing so for years now. The P4 famously included a pipeline stage which does no processing, it just transports data a long distance across the chip. (For that matter, the P4's "double pumped" ALU already operates at 6.8 GHz in the top of the line 3.4 GHz P4s, so there are real working shipping 6+ GHz logic circuits in processors today.)
As for chip-to-chip interconnects, many modern busses operate with multiple bits "in flight" on a single PCB trace because the trace is longer than the wavelength. For example, IBM's "Elastic IO" FSB for the PowerPC 970, which runs at 1 GHz in the top of the line PowerMac G5. Hypertransport too.
It's not the end of the world when delay issues like these crop up, it just makes the designs harder.
But that's how it is with a monopoly: one man screws up, and everybody suffers.
[this
Autonomic Computing
It's been the policy of some Operating Systems (FreeBSD and OS X, for example) for a while to use 100% of your RAM, on the basis that if it's not in use then it's wasted. The operating systems will speculatively cache anything that look potentially useful on the disk, and will over-allocate RAM to existing processes (at least in the case of OS X. Not sure about FreeBSD) so that malloc calls will return quickly.
Autonomic computing takes this even further, and says that the CPU should be in 100% use at all times. If it's not in use by applications then it should be indexing files, and predicting things the user might want to do in the future.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
That doesn't make those stats fine. For instance, what the hell does an OS need with a bleeding edge graphics card? What would you be doing with an OS that requires (for a home user) more graphics power than any of today's bleeding-edge cards (or yesterday's mediocre cards, for that matter)?
but by 2007......all those requirements will be already standard for a home PC. As humans, we tend to forget the past very quickly unless we are reminded of it once in a while. Well as I recall, in 2001 a PIII 733MHz was the fastest x86 processor you could buy, and 64MB's of RAM with a 15 GB's of ATA 100 HD was the standard. A 17 Inch Flat CRT was becomming standard for some systems. That was less than 3 years ago.
The bottom system today which I purchase for my company, for $399 Canadian Dollars ($270 US roughly) comes with an 80GB HD at 7200 RPM.
So think in terms of how *fast* computing power grows and how equally fast its price falls. By 2007 I'm thinking most of us will be running and coding for 64Bit systems.
I have Run WinXP on much much less power than MS recommended. You have to understand that Microsoft will try to take advantage of whatever they can, so if they think that a terabyte of storage will be standard by 2007, they will put that as the recommended space for Longhorn.
The concern should not lie on how much power Longhorn will require 3 to 4 years from now, the concern should be: how much better will it really be?
The phaomnneil pweor of the hmuan mnid. Fcuknig amzanig eh!
And, hopefully, all the hardware manufacturers will realize what they (and we) already understand now - that no one will be buying this overblown hardware system for home/personal use (well, ok, no normal mom-and-pop home user will) _especially_ since Microsoft will be including the "we control all that you see and hear" modules in Longhorn. Why, oh dear God why!?, would I pay $2,000 - $3,000 for a computer system I no longer control? Yeah, I wouldn't and neither will the general public. Both in my professional and personal life, all the people and businesses I quote out and build systems for don't want to pay even $1000 for a desktop system now - unless they are a gamer, cad/cam, graphics designer, or something along those lines.
My greatest hope is that all the top hardware manufacturers see dwindling sales (and dollars) in the future if they adopt Microsoft's specs for Longhorn PCs and collectively tell Microsoft "Fuck you!" That would make my millenium.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
a dual-core CPU
.net being CPU indepdendent...nah.
The only CPU roadmap that even shows these, let alone within the next 2-3 years, is the PowerPC. With the Xbox2 going PowerPC, and
running at 4 to 6GHz
We'll have CPUs at this speed on the desktop, but not laptops. And the desktop CPUs with these chips are going to suck massive power and need massive cooling solutions. Yikes.
a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM
RAM quantity has been slowing down. Dell still ships 256MB in most of their PCs. 2 GB is an 8x increase. The trouble here is that massive increases at these levels don't scale nearly as nicely as increases did in the past. At these levels, there are noticible power consumption increases from adding more memory. And memory prices have leveled off, with price hikes expected. We'll need to see some pretty drastic price decreases for 2GB to be the norm.
up to a terabyte of storage
Believable. Backing it all up will still be an issue.
a 1 Gbit, built-in, Ethernet-wired port and an 802.11g wireless link
Believable.
a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today.
No, sorry. ~35% of all PCs still ship with motherboard graphics that aren't even to the level of a GeForce 2 (e.g. no hardware T&L pipeline). Maybe the specs mean 3x the power of one of these? But if we're talking 3x a Radeon 9800, then no, it won't happen. We're getting huge boosts in graphics card power with the new offerings from ATI and nVidia, but at the same time the power consumption and cooling problems are increasing TREMENDOUSLY (i.e. you need a 480W power supply to use the new nVidia cards). These are not consumer level cards. None of these cards are anywhere near suitable for a laptop either, which is where the market is moving.
> The 6 GHz is a little fishy to me, and here's why:
:-P
> 6 GHz --> 0.17 ns per cycle. Light travels 5 cm (about two inches) in 0.17 ns, and information
> cannot travel faster than light. This means that even at the speed of light (electrical signals in
> typical electronics propogate at ~0.8 c, IIRC) it will take almost the entire clock cycle to get
> information across the chip, never mind whatever time it takes the transistors to respond.
Pipelining is a well-understood technique that was introduced to the x86 world with the 80486 processor (that's the one that was a generation before the Pentium for you new folk). The idea is that each stage of the pipeline acts as a dedicated, specialized processor with limited functionality that hands off its results to the next stage. It is analogous to the Assembly Line, where each worker has a specialized task and hands off each in-progress product to the next worker in the chain.
The key here is that the electrons only have to pass through *each stage* in a single cycle. If your cpu is 4cm across, then the electrical signals (according to your number) would take 0.17ns to cross it. But if the cpu were separated into ten stages, then the signals would only need to traverse 0.4cm during each cycle.
Naturally, the tradeoff is that when you increase the number of stages, then the number of cycles that each instruction needs to complete increases, so you get penalties from erroneous predictions and cache misses and the like.
So your 6GHz limit only applies if your cpu is a one stage processor. Most consumer desktop processors have ten to fifteen stages. The Pentium 4, depending on how you count it, has as many as twenty-eight stages.
> In the meantime, those nursing dreams of 100 GHz chips had better look beyond nanotech to
> picotech-- atom-sized transistors.
I don't think that I disagree here, despite my above comments. To do these frequencies without a dramatic decrease in transistor sizes would require an absolutely obscene level of pipelining, to the point that performance would take massive hits and operating temperatures would be quite Venusian.
--
-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main
typing this on my 500MHz laptop running 2K that is provided by a Fortune 500 technology company...
It's worked fine for 3 years and I see no reason to spend $2k of my company's money on a new one.
But the sad part is that many middle/upper-managers will have the very latest laptops (at least from what I've seen of my company) because they equate their laptop to their office size to their BMW 7-series to their vacation home... you're a loser if you have a 2 year old laptop and you're a manager... what's wrong w/ you that your company doesn't get you the latest and greatest?
and my favorite "What will the customer think if you show up with old technology!"...
Heaven forbid the customer should see that I can amortize an investment and continue to use perfectly good technology until it has broken or actually become dated. Wouldn't want them to know that we save money...
Frankly I wonder how serious our sales guys are taken by the customer when they show up in BMW's, w/ brand new laptops, expensive suits, bleeding edge cell phones and PDAs and then take them out for a $75/person dinner... and then say "we can't go any lower on the price". No kidding you can't... maybe that's because you look like you're getting paid $250k/yr to sell a couple of a freakin' widgets.
I don't see why this has become so famous if one thinks about it as a quote for the time. He did not say it should always be enough for everyone. In this current state of personal computing, someone could say, "A 3GHz processor ought to be enough for anyone." That means that a processor like that should handle whatever people need to do right now. In the future it's obvious that'll change, but why is that such a big deal?
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds