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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?"
There are three issues in multi-processor programming.
(1) OS and language support in the form of threading models
(2) OS and language support in the form of scheduling algorithms
(2) Application support in the form of using those threading models to develop program components that can run concurrently.
Let Microsoft focus on #1 and #2, and application developers focus on #3. The OS should not, IMHO, try to take a program that is not written to take advantage of multiple processors, and run it in a concurrent environment. That's just asking for trouble!
Advanced threading models that allow application developers better control over how their threads are executed, and scheduling algorithms that distribute threads across the multiple cores and processors, will pave the way for application developers to write applications that can truly benefit from a multi-core environment.
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.
Let Microsoft, and language developers, focus on the first two tasks. Make the tools available to application developers, and let application developers take advantage of those tools.
You might have missed the article from a few days ago but Microsoft already announced that the next version of Windows will be 64-bit only. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/17/145222 8
The big issue with pushing out 64-bit only with Vista is Intel not releasing 64-bit processors until more recently. AMD released the Athlon 64 long before Intel came out with their 64-bit Core2 Duos. The older Pentium-D and Core Duo multi core processors are still only 32-bit. This prevents people with the original Intel Mac books from running 64-bit Windows on it. It was also the reason that boot camp was needed to get Windows running easily on Macbooks. The Macbook doesn't have a standard BIOS, it has EFI. The 64-bit versions of Windows XP and Server 2003 where the only versions of Windows would support EFI pre-Vista. But the Macbook's processors where only 32-bit.
You also ran into the chicken and the egg issue with your parent's computer. Manufactures don't want to release updated 64-bit drivers for old obsolete hardware to get people to but new hardware; however, people don't want to have to buy all new hardware when they can simply install a 32-bit OS and everything will continue to work. By having 32 and 64-bit versions of Vista Microsoft allows people with older hardware to keep using what they always have while forcing manufactures to create 64-bit drivers if they want to receive WHQL approval. So in 5 years the majority of hardware available will have 64-bit drivers available.
As for only 32-bit versions of applications. Microsoft just killed off the ability to run 16-bit applications in Vista. Also how is it their fault that other software companies aren't releasing 64-bit versions or their software? With Vista being the first consumer level 64-bit Windows OS there is more incentive to release both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries. It will take time but it will happen.
Finally you might want to go rag on Apple a little more and not just Microsoft. They are in control of their hardware platform; however, they decided it was OK to stick with 32-bit processors with the initial move to Intel. There was already a huge shift due to the move from PowerPC to x86. Why not also move the OS and applications to 64-bit as well?
"Message passing as the fundamental operation of the OS is just
an excercise [sic] in computer science masturbation. It may feel good, but
you don't actually get anything DONE. Nobody has ever shown that it
made sense in the real world. It's basically just much simpler and
saner to have a function call interface, and for operations that are
non-local it gets transparently _promoted_ to a message. There's no
reason why it should be considered to be a message when it starts out."
- Linus Torvalds, 1999
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