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Bulky System Requirements for Windows Vista
unsurreal writes ""A Tech Strategist within Microsoft, Nigel Page, has gone on record to discuss the hardware requirements for Windows Vista, due out next Christmas." The next year is going to be an interesting one as hardware vendors smile towards the shocking new recommended hardware needed for the next generation Windows operating system." From the article: "Graphics: Vista has changed from using the CPU to display bitmaps on the screen to using the GPU to render vectors. This means the entire display model in Vista has changed. To render the screen in the GPU requires an awful lot of memory to do optimally - 256MB is a happy medium, but you'll actually see benefit from more. Microsoft believes that you're going to see the amount of video memory being shipped on cards hurtle up when Vista ships." Coverage available at Tom's Hardware as well, with a semi-transcript at Tech Ed.
I'm typing this from my Vista beta install on a 3-year old Dell Dimension 4400, P4 1.7GHz, 512MB RAM and a Matrox P750 VGA card. Hardly a high-end PC these days. Even this first beta, it's been running well so far, does a lot better on suspend/resume than XP did for me and doesn't seem sluggish. Sure you'll be able to get more bells and whistles up and running on faster hardware, but I have no complaints this far..
Before you flame me for being a MS zealot, the Vista machine is next to my Slackware 10.1 box and my really old Pentium 166 that is installing SCO OpenServer 5.0.2 as I type this. Computers are fun, regardless of the OS they run..
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
SATA NCQ does *NOT* give SCSI performance.
This is not to say it's not a hell of a lot more useful than not being able to do disconnected writes at all, but pre-insertion of write barriers instead of post insertion via scheduling is really a poor-man's version of I/O concurrency.
Unless you go out of your way to do a FUA (Force Unit Access), on SATA, there is no guarantee that write data has been committed to stable storage, rather than just cache.
In SCSI tagged command queueing, you can be guaranteed that the write has been committed to stable storage before the write is acknowledges as completed (yes, it's optional to turn this off in mode page 2, but only idiots do it).
The upshot of this is that the OS must issue FUA on writes and stall the pipeline for other writes that don't require a commitment to stable storage (e.g. FUA for metadata and journalling, no-FUA for other data).
This is (effectively) the difference between DOW (Delayed Ordered Writes) and SU (Soft Updates), which is what makes SU so much more effective than DOW.
Further, it means that the OS can't use the acknowledgement to schedule future operations on the disk, without knowing ahead of time the FUA is necessary for a given write.
The issue here is that if I'm, for example, updating the contents in a single directory entry block on disk in two different processes, instead of deciding to delay the second update until I know the first one has completed (via the acknowledgement), I must issue the first one as an FUA command, and then the second one as an FUA command, which adds latency to my pipeline.
"Mr. SATA, I've worked with Mr. SCSI, and you're no Mr. SCSI".
-- Terry
This is an inaccurate post in certain ways I am afraid.
You cannot meaningfully talk about a "median" hardware platform over a 6-10 year time scale. That's at least 2 upgrade cycles in duration.
When I ran XP the first time I checked to see how much RAM it was using and it was over 64MB without anything else loaded up.
That's wasn't criminal on its release date and it doesn't tally with (assuming the hyperbole of reports is accurate) Vista requiring high-end hardware on release.
I am also baffled as to how Vista's alleged requirement for powerful hardware is at all 'foresight'. Of course it'll run better on faster hardware, everything does.
Here's a prediction - Vista will not require the massive resources people are fearing to run that well. At least you'll be able to buy a reasonably-priced PC that can cope fine.
Anything else would be commercially inept.