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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."
640k ought to be enough for anybody.
> paging-file size increases from 16 TB to 512 TB
:)
Hope that's a maximum, not required
It still has Solitaire, right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_bloc
64-bit Windows will handle 16 terabytes of virtual memory, as compared to 4 GB for 32-bit Windows.
16 terabytes! That oughta be enough for anybody!
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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.
They have caught up with Ninendo64!
Mmm... well sort of. AFAIK, Tiger isn't fully 64bit. The only thing that is 64 bit in Tiger is its support for 64 memory for POSIX based apps...(Command line apps; server daemons and such) Tigers kernel will reside in 32 bit address space so that it can still run on the G3 and G4. XPx64 is fully 64 and as such can only run on the x64 architecture and is by no mean a patch up job.
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...has somuch more useless information that you need a dual monitor set up just to read it.
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64-bit Windows has been available for Itanium for several years now.
MS: "We finally have a 64-Bit version of Windows. Page file and virtual memory sizes have increased substantially. In recognition of this, all native Windows apps and all new releases of Office, Visual Studio .Net, and other core Microsoft products will be quickly bloated to take full advantage of these new sizes!"
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.
Do they release it because It Just Works?
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I've not come across a single app that won't run. What sort of apps are you finding problems with? Which build are you running?
scott
The submission is absolutely misleading.
Windows Server 2003 has supported 64-bits (Enterprise Edition and Datacenter edition) since its launch on IA64(Itanium). Before that, they also had 64-bit versions of Windows 2000 Server.
Windows XP Professional also had a 64-bit version since 2003, again running on the Itanium. However, XP on Itanium was discontinued as no one was using it outside MS testing labs.
Whats gonna be launched are x64 editions of XP and 2003 Server.
Life is just a conviction.
With kernel 2.6.11 I had no problem malloc()'ing 2^47 bytes (128TB) ! Memory overcommitting is on, of course. While it seems like an unneeded feature now, remember that W$ limitation means you cannot mmap() stuff >16TB, and this will be a painful limitation in a year or two (1TB IDE disks will soon be launched, I heard).
In addition, I was _really_ surprised to see that Intel's compiler still keeps "long" to 4 bytes on windows (didn't check, but so says their doc). With NO standard integer type for 64 bit, programming is set to be no fun on x86_64 under windows.
"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?
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Yes, I believe that's why the summary states "64-bit Windows will handle 16 terabytes of virtual memory, as compared to 4 GB for 32-bit Windows."
Ballmer: we've been working hard to find more bits for some time now
Press: so what exactly was found?
Ballmer: well i'm not entirely sure, you see everyone has been raving about us lacking in the bits in our products
Press: so what did you actually do about it?
Ballmer: we simply acquired the bits we were missing from our product offerings, various high profile acquisitions were conducted to ensure all bits were accounted for
Press: can you tell us preciously who was acquired ?
Ballmer: that would be telling, however I can say that I don't have the slightest idea what all this means, our customers have just been saying "give us more bits!" - we firmly believe we've been innovating for 20 years to continuly improve our products to contain more bits, or features as you will.
Press: Steve, I don't think you understand what you're talking about
Ballmer: we firmly believe we've been innovating for 20 years to continuly improve our products to contain more bits, or features as you will.
Press: you just said that, do you have anything more to add?
Ballmer: we now have more bits than the rest of the software vendor industry!
Press: yeah sure, you do..... {cut!}
Don't know what you're problem is but I have Windows 2000, and using NTFS i've got some files that are over 8gb.
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Ignore other post without paragraphs.
I'm not the original poster, but I'm running XP x64 RC2 and have had problems with Nero (asks for enterprise key just to run, then it works fine), printer drivers for Canon IP2000 (although driver problems are expected, and the built in BJC-8000 drivers work fine for printing, have to hook it up to 32-bit Windows machine to do head cleaning etc), ZoneAlarm doesn't install (although Tiny has a 64-bit Windows firewall available now), a few motherboard utils for my A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard won't run (but 64 bit versions seem to be appearing), Doom 3 and some other software complains when installing - but editing the MSI file, or running in Windows XP compatiblity mode to get around this usually lets it install and run fine. Had a problem with GetRight crashing so switched to Free Download Manager (shared internet connection so really need the speed capping), haven't tried any BitTorrent apps (hacked together an app which passes torrents to my laptop) but presumably will have same problem as 32-bit SP2 - initialising socket caps.
Apart from my printer, all my hardware works fine (A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard, NVIDIA 6600GT PCI-Express graphics card, 1GB Crucial PC4000 RAM, 200GB Maxtor Diamondmax 10 SATA HD, 120GB Maxtor Diamondmax 9 ATA133 HD, NFORCE4 onboard sound, NEC ND-3500 DVD burner, and some other generic 8x DVD reader), although it can be a big sluggish when copying large files from/to HD I think that's down to drivers rather than anything else.
Using Firefox 1.0.3 for browsing, Media Player Classic 6.4.8.2 for video, Winamp 5 for music and never had any problems with them, so don't know what poster above is talking about unless is using a very early build (used 1218 previously and only had same issues as I do now - only difference I noticed was upgraded Windows apps - IE got SP2'd with popup blocker, Solitair is 64-bit etc).
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Nowadays I think it's more like, "Three user-land tasks should be enough for poor foreigners."
Stick Men
Uhh.. NTFS has always been a 64 bit filesystem. FAT is 32 bit and only supports 2GB files.
Also, many C based apps only use a 32 bit file pointer, so that could be your problem as well.
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Not true. The system is based on Fat Binaries. These allow an executable package to contain code for multiple platforms. Theoretically, you could put versions of the same application for NextStep MC68K, OpenStep, OSX 32, OSX 64, Darwin x86 and several others in the same package and have it look like one program. Too big for you? Run lipo to remove versions you don't need. The whole system is based around this concept, allowing the OS to be fully 64bit on 64bit systems and fully 32bit on 32bit systems. Even XCode allows people on 32bit machines to design and compile applications for both platforms and release the compiled application in fat binary format.
Windows ia a:
32-bit kludge running on top of a
16-bit patch to an
8-bit operating system written for a
4-bit microprocessor by a
2-bit company that can't stand
1-bit of competition
The only real advantage 64-bit has over 32-bit for anyone outside of the supercomputing realm is the memory it can access. ALL applications in Tiger can access 64-bit memory if they are written for it meaning the backend is not written for Cocoa but for Darwin. BTW, Darwin is different than POSIX.
The true genius of Apple is that the data model for Tiger is LP64 which means source for Linux, SGI and Sun is easy to port to the G5 with Tiger.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
The big reason for going to 64-bit Windows has nothing to do with the word size. The main reason is that AMD64 has shed another chunk of the 8086 instruction set legacy. The IA32 has 8 32-bit general purpose registers, about the same total register storage as the Cosmac 1802... a 4/8 bit microprocessor from the '70s. AMD64 gives you 16 64-bit registers, which is pretty small for a 64-bit machine (Alpha and Power have 32) but big enough to give the compiler room to work in, especially since it's also doubling the number of SSE registers.
Here's some other computers for comparison:
PDP-11, late '60s... 8 16-bit general purpose registers.
VAX, '70s... 16 32-bit GPRs.
68000, ~'80... 8 32-bit GPRs, 8 32-bit index registers.
z8000, ~'80... 16 16-bit registers.
8086, late '70s, 8 16-bit GPRs.
MIPS, '80s, 32 32-bit registers.
SPARC, ~'90... 32 32-bit GPRs, but only 8 were really usable as GPRs for the optimiser. Thus has hurt the Sparc's performance.
Power PC, '90s, 32 32 or 64-bit GPRs
Alpha, '90s, 32 64-bit registers
I would say the 4x register-file space increase is going to be far more important than the larger virtual memory.
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.
Why?
Because it's a logical step in the advancement of computers.
I can remember a good 17 years ago debating with a "computer expert" about hard drives. He said that nobody would ever need anything bigger then a one megabyte HDD. I still think about that and smile.
Back then, nobody could predict the way computers would shape our lives. Now, of course, we know.
Small steps in the advancement of hardware and software typically don't revolutionize our use of computers, but putting them all together has a dramatic effect. So we've started a shift towards 64 bit. We've got the hardware, and now we're getting the software. Yes, at first it won't be a big deal to the end users, but that leap will ultimately give us more power and flexibility to do more advanced things.
We've got a lot more we can do with computers, and not just with games. Parsing human speech into text, for example, is currently pretty bad. Being able to recognize features in an image is rudimentary at best. No, a 64 bit OS won't change that, but it will lead to a better hardware and software base to make it easier for developers to approach those goals.
Moving to 64 bit is not being done "just because", it's being done as a step in the continued evolution of computing technology, which leads to better advances down the road.
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It's also not like we had 3.8Ghz 32 bit processors with 4GB of RAM and 400GB drives when the first 32 bit versions of Windows showed up circa 1995. Heck, the Win95 requirements could be satisfied with a 386 and math coprocessor, 8MB of RAM and 30MB of hard drive space. The upper limits of 32 bit computing sounded just about as high back then.
When you release a completely new platform, it had BETTER have some room for technology that doesn't exist right now.
The typical 486 or 1st generation Pentium was running at a clock speed less than 1% of the 64 bit procesors of today, 16MB of RAM similar, etc.
Those numbers put these ceilings pretty easily in range and possibly too conservative.
Sometimes you have to plan for really big numbers. I'm not thrilled with what cars, food, etc. are going to cost (with nothing more than normal inflation) in 35 years when I'm 65, but that doesn't change the fact that I should really plan for about 4 million in assets to completely retire at that age. Saying that $125,000 will be a modest salary equivalent to $45,000 this year matches up pretty well.
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