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Microsoft to Launch 64-bit Windows on Monday
maotx writes "Several news outlets are reporting that Microsoft will officially roll out 64-bit versions of its Windows operating systems on Monday. As compared with existing 32-bit versions: 64-bit Windows will handle 16 terabytes of virtual memory, as compared to 4 GB for 32-bit Windows. System cache size jumps from 1 GB to 1 TB, and paging-file size increases from 16 TB to 512 TB."
Just wondering. Obviously Solaris, IRIX, Linux, AIX, Mac OS X and whatever other UNIX flavors are out there (well, except for maybe SCO...) have had 64-bit support for some number of years now.
:)
Is Windows the last major commercial OS to add 64-bit support, or are there others I'm missing?
(Even if it is the last one, I'm sure Microsoft will tout this as supremely innovative.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
How long is the IT industry going to let Microsoft hold it back?
I've been messing around with Ubuntu for x86-64 lately and while it is pretty snappy, I miss things a lot of the little things (like the flash plugin) that were never compiled for a 64 bit system.
Is Microsoft going to have a similar problem, in that it has a nice OS, but few apps to run on it?
Microsoft also provided 64-bit Windows NT for Sparc. However, this is their up-to-date operating system ported to a 64-bit arch.
We aren't talking quantum leaps in computing. . .
Actually, this is a quantum leap in computing. The leaps have gone in the sequence 4,8,16,32,64. I leave it as an exercise for the student to determine what the next quantum leap in the sequence might be.
Now, let's not always see the same hands.
MS simply made the jump a bit later than some.
AMD supplied the needed energy to jump to the next, ummmm, shell, by applying a cattle prod to their collective posteriors.
KFG
To try and take away the thunder from Mac OS X "Tiger".
"How long will it be until competitors such as IBM, HP, Sun Microsystems, Apple Computer and Linux Technology get their code ported to 64-bits?"
The scary thing is that there are likely people who believe this.
I am curious though, I wonder if the 64-bit Windows version can easily switch to 32-bit, a la Solaris?
"It's too bad stupidity isn't painful." - A. S. LaVey
Wrong. A hardcore nerd doesn't have enough social skills to convert their relatives.
Linux is not Windows
COME ON.
Please not again this "why is the maximum 1000, NOBODY will ever use more then 10" talk.
Why should it be limited to less than 512TB? Any reason for such a thing? No.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Plus, it will swap everything out to disk even when there's terabyte of free RAM no matter how hard you plead with it not to!
Seriously, when will Redmond stop eutrophycating and start engineering this platform, that once showed so much promise?
You are in a maze of twisty little passages; all alike.
The only upside here is that my friends are still replacing their old Windows machines on a regular basis and giving away their old hardware as "scrap". The last machine I got was a 1.6GHz machine with 256MB of memory and a 40GB hard drive. It's now serving as our company's chat server.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
16TB of virtual memory... 512TB page file... aren't they the same thing?
The only real benefit to most people is the artificial limit of 2GB (user data addressable) for a single win32 process.
Everything else isn't really a benefit but actually decreases performance by a small amount (either increase memory usage and/or increased time due to increased memory usage)
It always makes me laugh when people think that 64bit is like the magical bullet of performance. For 99% of people, there is no reason to change for a few years yet.
"Hello ... CompUSA, I'd like a copy of the new 64 bit Windows and a 64 Gig memory SIMM please.
"What ?!?!? I can't get that.
"Well, can I have a Western Digital 64 Terrabyte hard drive please.
"Oh ??!?! I can't have that either."
Wake me up in a few years when there is some point to all this.
-- "It's not stalking if you're married!" My Wife.
What to do with the new, seemingly-incredible increase in computer power is always the second question asked when Moore's law makes a new level of technology possible. The first question is always "How do we get it work?".
So let's look back at the unexpected developments with previous jumps in microprocessor power:
1973 - 1976 -- 4040 - CPU chips enter geek consciousness. Public discovers interactive television as 'PONG'. A cubic foot of TTL chips on PCBs replaced by a handful of programmable chips.
late 1970s -- Z80 - Accountants stunned as changing a single entry in columns of figures recalculates them all instantenously. Typists amazed at being able to just hit a backspace key to change a misstruck letter, and printing a page after the mistakes have been corrected.
early 1980s -- 8086 - IBM makes it possible for you to convince the boss to buy the PCs that makes your office work shine.
late 1980s -- 80286 - GUI PCs transform symbol and visual-based professions. Photo editors, SPICE, MIDI, AutoCAD, PCB autorouter programs appear. IBM PC clones replace 8-bit BASIC trainers in the home.
early 1990s -- 80486 - Windows and Wolfenstein and Wavetable soundcards.
late 1990s -- Pentium One - Internet and MP3 revolutions
early 2000s -- MultiGigHz Pentiums - Home libraries, 5000 music albums on a $100 hard disk (music industry freaks out), full movies on 15 cent CDs, home PCs doing professional level advising (law, medicine, etc..), near free global communication, primitive language translation, speech-to-text
late 2000s -- the TeraByte era - you tell me!!
I have an Athlon 64 system I built, and I'm currently running regular Windows XP Home (which I had a license for from a previous computer, and didn't feel like buying XP Pro). One thing I haven't seen yet is what the costs will be of this x64 version of Windows XP. Will it be a free upgrade? If not, any idea on what it's going to cost? One reason I never tried out the pre-release version of x64 is that it seemed to require an XP Pro key, which I didn't have.
What's your problem with dual booting? I have a reasonably good computer, and I want to have the maximum performance possible in either operating system.
Plus I have no problems with having a dual boot setup and it's quite functional.
As for VMWare, VMWare is not free unless you warez it, and really VMWare has several limitations. Eg. Multisim 7 runs very slow, 3d applications just don't work, etc (it's a good product otherwise, I love VMWare for what it can do)
I need these applications and I have no choice in my need of them unless I seek another profession. If I had all the software I needed under Linux, I probably wouldn't bother with dual booting. But reality dictates otherwise...
A second PC is something I have used for a long time, but then that second PC got outdated, and I don't want to spend the money on another PC. Keeping one computer upgraded is enough of a financial burden on me, two is just not realistic.
NT on Alpha 10 years ago was NOT a 64 bit os. It was a 32 bit OS running on a 64 bit cpu.
but they blew it. as did everybody else.
Tell that to my dual 667 Alpha7 box that I've had for almost 6 years now running 64bit Linux.
STFU about slashdot bias.
Sure for some special applications this might be good, but for the average Joe running his email and an occasional spreadsheet why does it matter? What we have now vastly exceedes 99% of users needs now.
Except of course to help force people back into the upgrade cycle.
"just beacuse" isnt a reason to do something.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Well, technically Windows x64 Edition will be out a few days before OS X "Tiger" - which is the first version of OS X to have any real 64-bit support.
It's also worth noting that adding 64-bit support to a PowerPC-based OS is much easier than adding it to an x86-based OS. PowerPC was designed with 64-bit operation in mind, x86 was not.
Prior to "Tiger," the best OS X could do was to support 4GB of memory per processor, with a maximum of 4GB of memory given to one application (because of the 32-bit address map).
Windows XP has been able to do that in PAE mode ("Physical Address Extension") for years now. That's why two years ago you could buy 32-bit Xeon systems with 12GB of memory from Dell (and you still can).
Given the nature of the move to 64-bit architectures, I think the industry as a whole is doing quite well.
If you want to bicker about Windows x64 vs. Tiger, then Windows clearly wins. In Tiger, GUI apps can't be 64-bit (you have to write 2 executables to support 32-bit graphical output from a 64-bit backend service). Windows x64 has no such limitation.