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Next Windows To Get Multicore Redesign

Posted by kdawson on from the racing-to-the-next-deadlock dept.

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?"

5 of 417 comments (clear)

  1. Windows is already multithreaded by jshriverWVU · · Score: 0, Troll
    So not sure what they mean but redesigning. What would be nice is to make the windows kernel truly preemptive multitasking. I like how in Linux you can kill -9 a rogue program, but when a program crashes in windows it takes the whole system down. Ctrl-alt-delete (kill process) how often does it really kill the process vs hanging the system.

    Anyway, no need to redesign, just fix what they already have.

    1. Re:Windows is already multithreaded by norminator · · Score: 0, Troll

      On the few occassions that a program goes belly up and I close it Via the task manager my system will generally hiccup for a few minutes and then recover and go on back to what it was doing.
      Not if it's Internet Exploder... Everytime IE gets stuck you have to restart explorer.exe
  2. hot diggity damn! by jollyreaper · · Score: 1, Troll

    Imagine a beowulf clusterfuck of these.

    --
    Kwisatz Haderach
    Sell the spice to CHOAM
    This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
    1. Re:hot diggity damn! by jollyreaper · · Score: 0, Troll

      Troll? Fuck you. This is a joke concerning the everpresent beowulf meme and the inevitably sucky nature of whatever Microsoft comes up with. A beowulf cluster of these systems would, by definition, have to be a beowulf clusterfuck. In closing, fuck you.

      --
      Kwisatz Haderach
      Sell the spice to CHOAM
      This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
  3. Re:How did you get modded troll? by drsmithy · · Score: 0, Troll

    I'll never understand slashdot moderation.

    Me either. Accurate moderation would have been "-1, Wrong" or "-1, Ignorant".