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Next Windows To Get Multicore Redesign
eldavojohn writes "A Microsoft executive announced that the next Windows will be fundamentally redesigned to handle the numerous cores of present and future processors. The article notes that the NT technology underneath Vista has been able to take advantage of multiple processors since 1993, and can now handle 32 or 64 cores. And since Microsoft completely rewrote the 20-year-old GDI/GDI+ model for Vista, what more can (or should) they parallelize? It will be interesting to see how Microsoft tackles the race conditions and deadlocks that come with pervasively multithreaded software and in the past complicated attempts (like that of BeOS) to utilize multiple CPUs. Do you think it's it a smart move to further complicate an operating system to take advantage of multiple cores, or should Microsoft stick to its knitting while applications take advantage of (possibly) more resources?"
Didn't they only just fundamentally rewrite Windows Vista?
Deleted
I suppose you've never seen /zombie processes in linux...
too bad most of us have.
Sigs are for the weak.
Now we all will have buy to 8core machines with 16G memory as a minimum model, based on what just happened with Vista.
How is that helping their customers? Oh yeah, DELL is their customer, not us.
sticking in a DVD still hang Explorer for the 5-10 seconds it takes to spin up and read the TOC?
/frank
How many years has Windows had this obvious, annoying flaw?
And the worms ate into his brain.
Why bother talking about multi core supporting operating systems when we still haven't embraced 64-bit technology yet. Why bother pushing for a new technology when the current 'new' technology hasn't even been implemented yet. IMHO, Microsoft should have made Vista 64-bit only and kept XP alive for the 32-bit people who don't want to migrate. This would force people to write 64-bit drivers and software in order to be on 'average Joe's' new PC. Instead, they've done what they've been doing for the past 30 years, compromising due to lack of adaptation.
Now I'm no supporter of Microsoft. I personally hate them. But you have to see where I'm coming from.
I recently built a new PC for my parents. It was a simple box with a Sempron 3000, 1gb DDR, 80Gb HDD, etc. It was all 64-bit compatible so I though Vista Home Premium 64-bit would be the best way to go. Their scanner isn't supported, their antivirus isn't supported, and the devices and software they use that DO work on Vista, are all running in 32-bit mode because there is no equivalent for 64-bit.
Please lets implement the great technology we have before concentrating on the future.
You moved your mouse. Please restart Windows for changes to take effect.
This is all very nice they are doing this, but the need is now. Not just for windows, but all the apps have to become multi-core aware. Right now having a dual or quad core for most apps is like having a care with an extra engine or two in the trunk not connected to any drivelines. CPUs have hit a wall in terms of speed because of heat, so the manufacturers are giving us mulit-core. Very nice, but consumer-level apps that use them would be nice. Some professional apps are multi-core aware, but at the consumer level...
And preferably this year, not 2009
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.
Affordable processing power, for home users, isn't going to come from faster mhz as much as from multiple cores, so naturally new software will need to take advantage of this new hardware to be competitive.
Any OS that doesn't provide support may find itself outdistanced from an OS that does. Of course, if an OS doesn't have a very large game base to begin with, then they won't have much to lose either.
As an application developer, one of the biggest problems I've encountered in developing multi-threaded applications is the ability to easily control what can run concurrently, and what can't. I have almost no ability to tell the operating system which threads I want to run concurrently, and which I want it to time-share.
But you can even in most of the more primitive threading models.
All it takes is having a resource and a lock...
If there is anything that really annoys me as an administrator and 'power' user, it is those developers who think they know better what else is happening on my machine then the OS or me as its admin. This is why resource based decisions on concurency are strongly prefered over the developer being able to enable/disable concurency at a whim. Sure, it forces you as a developer to think a lot more about it, but know what, that is a one time process. The consequences of not putting in that thought occur everytime the program is used.
Five years from now Windows will support multiple cores. Which is what OS X is doing on my MacBook Pro RIGHT NOW.
I believe the largest SMP system that OSX has ever been run on is 8 cores. Windows has run on a 64 CPU system and Linux on a 1024 CPU system.
So I'm kind of struggling to understand how OSX is superior in this regard. I know there must be a technical explanation, because it's not like Mac owners to post single lines of obvious bullshit in an attempt to advocate their systems while actually just annoying the fuck out of everyone.
You put $4k down for a pc to run Microsoft desktop software. You should change your nick to GullableTwat23
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Dual core alone makes a difference for the average user .... yes web browsing is single threaded but you aren't. If they are doing anything CPU intensive (media encoding/ITunes ... what have you :) it can render a single core system unresponsive where with a dual core system you don't even really notice.
Personally I have a quad core setup (2 opteron 265's) and it's routinely up over 50% (not doing media encoding).
I don't know which version of Windows you're running (3.1 perhaps), but Vista (and previous versions of the NT kernel) have been truly preemptive from day one and you can kill user level processes from task manager and stop and restart services without bringing the system down. I literally can't remember an application making any of my Windows systems come down.
I think the interesting thing here is the "design center" for OS is changing dramatically, in the past 99% of Windows desktops were uniprocessor and I dare say that they made design choice around that. Now we are moving to a world where 2- and 4-way desktops are common and the number of cores is only going to increase over time. That means you may well start to look at some fundamentally different ways of doing things, perhaps dedicating cores to specific tasks within the OS, for example a core might be dedicated to handling the IP stack while another might handle GDI requests. I'm not saying that this is what will happen, just that widespread use of multi-CPU systems may change the tradeoffs in OS design.
I don't know, it's pretty goddamned funny to those of us who run Linux...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There is nothing wrong with using a proven design from another product in a new product. OpenOffice.org has stolen from MS-Office, Firefox has stolen from Opera, Thunderbird has stolen from Outlook Express, Linux has stolen from UNIX, the GIMP has stolen from Photoshop, Evolution has stolen from Outlook, and so on, and so forth...
Not every single piece of software needs to be 100% unique and original. Taking an old design and improving it is a very valid method of designing something new. <obligatory_car_analogy>Heck, every single car today is a total rippoff of the Ford Model T</obligatory_car_analogy>
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
It made a lot of sense at the time though.
At the time, a simplistic way to distinguish between "reasonably big iron which was bought by someone who obviously had money to burn" and "ordinary desktop PC" without doing all sorts of strange tests would be simply to count the number of processors. You'll have one in most PCs, 2 in a high powered workstation. Any more than that, it's pretty much guaranteed to be a server class machine.
From a marketing perspective, it's common practise to carve a market up into chunks according to "how much each chunk is prepared to pay for a product", and pitch different versions of essentially the same product (perhaps with the odd feature added or removed) to each chunk. License according to processors, and you force the part of the market which is prepared to buy a very expensive system (and thus must have a fair bit of cash) to buy the more expensive OS to go with it. Similar reasoning is why there's so many different versions of Vista.