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Windows 7 To Be 256-Core Aware
unassimilatible writes "As new features of Windows 7 continue to trickle out, ZDNet is now reporting that it will scale to 256 processors. While one has to wonder, like with Vista, how many of the teased features will actually make it into the final OS, I think we can all agree, 256 cores is enough for anybody." This Mark Russinovich interview has some technical details (Silverlight required).
While one has to wonder, like with Vista, how many of the teased features will actually make it into the final OS
If you're going by their track record, it's an easy answer: None.
My browser already supports audio, video, vector graphics and a scripting language.
I think we can all agree, 256 cores is enough for anybody.
I just put the finishing touches on my 257 core machine, you insensitive clod!
Suggestion for new /. poll. Who has installed Silverlight? (Silverlight required)
RTFA my ass!
The most recent mainline Linux release has integrated mature patches for 4096 core scalability, that have been developed by high performance computing corporations and tested in the field for years. Previous versions were rated for "only" 1024 cores. That still makes 256 look like a Gameboy.
It must be really hard for Microsoft to compete in the HPC space. I almost feel bad for them. Almost.
Sam ty sig.
.... testing the waters via marketing that which may or not come into some form of existence.
They use the same tactic as well, to help suppress any interest a competitor might be getting with some technology by claiming they are doing the same, where often enough they kill teh support teh competitor was getting while never producing that which they claimed they were doing.
So take this current claim in such a light and you'll know "believe it when you know you have it and are using it, not even a split second before".
Can we just agree on either measuring in processors or in cores. What does that now mean? 256*n cores. Or 256 cores on 256 single-core processors. Or ...
Since these seem to be powers of two, it's 4 orders of magnitude, actually.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
The fact that it's slower, less stable, far more bloated, takes longer to boot, has that ridiculously badly-thought-out UAC, and has far worse hardware support than XP? They can address those things in Windows 8. As long as Windows 7 can handle 256 cores, everything is good in the world!
They are already showing up as 128 cores on a fairly affordable box.
I won't believe a thing Microsoft says about Windows 7 until I see it. Microsoft is like a political candidate running for office. It makes a ton of promises you know it'll never keep.
How will Vista (and, indeed, Linux) manage memory across so many cores? The machine can't be SMP, because you can't maintain data cache coherence across more than about eight cores. So it has to have a completely new memory model. I wonder how this can be achieved without major changes to the kernel?
The tao of democracy: the government you can vote for is not the real government.
256 cores means that it can be stored in a 16-byte flag. Coincidentally, most current implementations of x64 (not the very first Athlon64s, though) implement instructions for atomic 16-byte operations. It seems like MS thinks that the performance benefits of being able to store affinity and other status flags in this manner outweigh the downsides. By the way, I would say this is more to handle things like 32 cores of 8-way SMT, than 256 actual cores. MS can accept losing the niche of very large shared-memory systems, but not the midrange servers of tomorrow.
No... No he didn't.
Saying that nobody needs more cores is like they said that noone will ever need more than a few bauds of network traffic.
It's bullshit. AFAIK Sun is already building machines with more cores.
Sigh, first off, it was 640kb of ram, and second off it's not even his quote. And additionally I'm not sure who really said it, but it wasn't Gates.
The 640kb wasn't meant in the long term it was meant at that point, a time when they were talking about how to divy up the limited ram. It was the sensible way to proceed, it's just that drivers and such didn't get loaded into the rest of the ram causing huge headaches for gaming.
Even at that point it was asinine to suggest that ram wouldn't become more common in machines. I think at that point they'd already seen ram increase by a few thousand percentage points easy if not more.
No Silverlight, no Moonlight, it's bad enough that I've got to deal with Microsoft's broken security zones at work, I'm not going to start running son-of-ActiveX at home.
Except that he never said that.
Swooooosh!
or just in an HPC version?
even with current growth, i cant see a 256 core cpu in the reasonable future, does MS maybe expect multi-processor motherboards to start creeping into desktops?
if this is only for an HPC edition, it doesnt seem like much, cpus with 8 cores are available now, so 16 core chips seem likely in the not to distant future, which would only allow 16 processors, with quad processor boards available now, that would mean your core limit could be reached in just 4 boards.
im no expert but this seems either totally excessive or nowhere near enough
on a side, how many cores do vista, xp etc support?
if I had a machine with 256 cores I would be using an OS that fit the dedicated process I was coding for, not one that added to the overhead.
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
``I think we can all agree, 256 cores is enough for anybody''
No. Why would that be enough? I can think of many scenarios where more cores would be useful, and computers with more cores have already been built.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Paste into VLC, mplayer etc: mms://mschnlnine.wmod.llnwd.net/a1809/d1/ch9/9/1/1/5/3/4/RussinovichInsideWindows7_s_ch9.wmv
Presumably they will eventually release Crysis 2.
The only useful apps bundled with Windows. Please don't mess with them, primitive as they may be.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
.... testing the waters via marketing that which may or not come into some form of existence.
They use the same tactic as well, to help suppress any interest a competitor might be getting with some technology by claiming they are doing the same, where often enough they kill teh support teh competitor was getting while never producing that which they claimed they were doing.
So take this current claim in such a light and you'll know "believe it when you know you have it and are using it, not even a split second before".
I have another theory. MS, not wanting to waste time, money, people, and any other resource on developing something that may not do well in the market place, tests the waters to see if anyone actually wants the product. Maybe if they did that with Vista, they wouldn't have that train wreck.
Microsoft is a mature company in a mature industry. The days of investing a product and crossing your fingers that it will sell are long gone. They need to think like a car company now.
.. how many of the people complaining here are going to run Windows 7 with more than 256 cores? No, really, I'd love to know why.
Can you imagine a beowolf cluster of those?
Neither can I.
I am a name troll of Westlake. Visit my homepage to learn why.
If you look more closely (just below the description section) there are download links for:
* iPod (MP4)
* MP3
* PSP (MP4)
* WMA
* WMV
* WMV (High)
* Zune
256 cores means that it can be stored in a 16-byte flag
Er... there are 128 bits in 16 bytes. HTH.
Someone once said there would never be a need for more than 640K in a personal computer. I wouldn't be so bold as to say 256 processor cores would be enough in a personal computer.
Regards,
Ryan Pritchard
Fun Extends All Basic Life Expectancies
Available to today already:
http://blogs.sun.com/sistare/entry/solaris_for_the_t5440
But I don't see a port of Windows7 to SPARC on the horizon, so there's hardly something to compare here...
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Given how many NT4 installs still out there. You should expect a 15-year lifespan.
Given the number of 4 core machines out there; combine with moores law (double every 18 months)
4 * 2^10 = 4096 core machines at 2Ghz in 15 years. Who knows what the new OSes will
REALLY need, but a 256 core plan is probably actually minimal.
Unless you want to run the new interface, oh and antivirus, at the same time.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"I think we can all agree, 256 cores is enough for anybody." ... For now.
Saying anything is enough for anybody is dangerous in this business. Though 256 cores in a single unit is a lot for common people, it is not beyond the realm of super- or high performance computing.
The future may see CPU's with a hell of a lot of very small, somewhat specialized cores. The Cell or the current crop of GPU's may be paving the way for that idea, where for instance the ATI 4850 and 4870 have 800 processing units on a single chip, in 5-10 years those units are bound to be immeasurably more complex and plentiful than today. Imagine a CPU made up of over a thousand cores, each on par or better than the Intel Atom...and even then I think I'm shooting below the mark at 10 years.
You are wanting to run the new Microsoft Office. Then you will have underpowered machine, but just wait for Windows 8.
-- A computer without Windoze is like a choclate cake without mustard
Except the architecture they chose was pretty much limited to 640, so i don't buy your argument.
Sure, soon afterwards ways around it was found, and eventually broken completely but it was a HARD limit at one point and i don't give Bill credit for seeing beyond his nose due to his 'self importance' attitude, which has burnt him more then once ( but with billions in the bank, its easy to buy your way out of a mistake ).
It was also marketing spin against the competing motorola chips ( and systems ) which could address more. "you really don't need that extra headroom, stick with microsoft'
---- Booth was a patriot ----
http://mschnlnine.vo.llnwd.net/d1/ch9/9/1/1/5/3/4/RussinovichInsideWindows7_ch9.mp4
Currently HPC doesn't trend this way either. HPC tends not to be large, single system image designs at this point in time. They tend to be many nodes with independent kernel instances.
The only market that *currently* trends toward this that comes to mind is virtualization. A virtualization server, however, would not be running Windows 7 (if anything MS, it would be a server edition. Even if not for technical reasons, for licensing reasons it pretty much would have to not be a 'desktop/worskstation' edition).
In terms of why, keep in mind it was probably a convenient limit to implement, and not much point from a technical standpoint to do less. In terms of the timeframe they are keeping in mind for desktops, they probably want to be usable on systems 8-10 years after it releases. XP remains a significant product, 7 years after release. XP is afflicted by barriers that seemed out of reach in 2001 for desktops (~3 GB of ram). Many companies are taking a wait-and-see for Windows 7, due to design decisions in Vista they don't agree with. MS more than ever has to prepare for a potential long life for their platform even beyond a new release. If Windows 7 manages to win back a reputation, they hope it will shield them from a potential Windows 8 flop. If Windows 7 flops, they have a significant problem on their hands as those companies that refuse Vista and 7 will be forced to migrate to stay in the current market. If they think 7 will be painful for them, they may think more about a Linux platform, which probably would be more painful a transition, but would be more hypothetically future-proof once done (worst comes to worse, hire an in-house developer to extend your basic platform if you don't like the direction, but generally you can make a brand-new distribution behave pretty much like RH7.3 if you absolutely need to)..
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Supposedly it's an urban legend that he even said that, because no one on the internet can actually source the quote. And if the internet can't find it, then it probably doesn't exist. To sate those who want at least something, however, here is a relevant quote from 1989:
"I have to say that in 1981, making those decisions, I felt like I was providing enough freedom for 10 years. That is, a move from 64k to 640k felt like something that would last a great deal of time. Well, it didn't - it took about only 6 years before people started to see that as a real problem."
Hmmm. -1 and -1 mods.
The Microsoft Moderator Minions are out early today.
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
It's aware of 256 cores, nothing about utilizing the 256. I'm guessing it probably has more to do with licensing, it needs to detect the cores properly so it can bill you for them individually.
Well, the plan in Linux is to allow distros to release their desktop kernels preconfigured for 4096 cpus with no measurable runtime costs even for dual core desktops.
and was impressed by how much they'd slimmed down Windows 7.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
...and you'll need a license for every core.
...but 256 core PERFORMANCE is not.
Overhead for an O.S. to manage memory and I/O contention rises dramatically *way* down in the CPU-count scale (like around 8 CPUs). It is one thing to let those CPUs be available to the exclusive use of a particular CPU-aware application, such as a custom video frame rendering app. But give an application-ignorant O.S. the job of keeping processes from stepping on each other in a 256-way box and you'll see a box whose primary workload is lock and wait management.
It's not surprising that "big box" manufacturers like IBM and HP charge so much for their high-end gear. It takes particularly tailored efforts and certain types of workloads to drive performance out of those things, and even there, performance tends to fall dramatically after 32 CPUs. It's not surprising that they employ partitioning and virtualization to divide and conquer the use of so many CPUs rather than actually treat them like one big box.
Of course, there will always be a number of consumers who will pay for Big-CPU-Count Bragging Rights, ignoring the fact that the last 50% of their CPUs deliver less incremental performance than the first 10%.
So is this one of the pillars of the Windows 7 strategy?
... who read the headline as "Windows 7 to be 256 color aware".
Actually, it's only funny until thinking about it. Too bad.
... 255 will be used for the all-new-3d-holographic-userinterface...
Obviously, there will be 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, and 256 versions. Features vary. Standard upgrade rules on the first four relative to Vista, then they can premium price the last five as "Corporate", "Super-Corporate", "Hyper-Corporate", "Gold" and "Platinum". Should be simple enough.
I've read that it was an IBM engineer who said it. Could be another urban legend.
Anyway, Gates denied saying it: http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1997/01/1484 (Oldest link - it's from 1997 - that I could find.)
QUESTION: "I read in a newspaper that in l981 you said '640K of memory should be enough for anybody.' What did you mean when you said this?"
ANSWER: "I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time."
Gates goes on a bit about 16-bit computers and megabytes of logical address space, but the kid's question (will this boy never work at Microsoft?) clearly rankled the billionaire visionary.
"Meanwhile, I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again."
It needs that kind of core support, to scale to the cloud.
Windows will let you "rent" cores are your nearest point-of-presence. You will be charged by the core, and by the core cycle.
You will pay for your computing with "small monthly fees" and "small pay per use" fees for applications.
"your" computer will just be a dumb terminal that you will rent for a "small monthly fee".
Microsoft will store your data, available to you at a "small monthly fee".
Think it won't work? It works for cellphones. You don't own it, you don't even own your data.
Welcome back to the mainframe era.
...but OTOH I remember someone (IIRC it might have been from IBM) saying that nobody would ever need a hard drive bigger than 10MB. But whether or not my recollections are correct, such predictions are inevitably consigned to the "famous last words" category.
And if the internet can't find it, then it probably doesn't exist.
Nonsense! I've read all about it on Wikipedia!
Those of us who think they know everything annoy those of us who do.
Based on the announcements on Windows 7 and the reviews I thought too that they had improved the performance of Windows 7 vs. Vista. Then I found an article by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols that might explain the "glowing" reviews at Microsoft's PDC. It seems that Microsoft may have permanently "loaned" $2,000 laptops with 2.4GHz Intel dual cores + 3GB ram to the "reviewers" to review Windows 7. If so, that's not the first time they tried that stunt (Vista was the first that I recall). So in the answer to the question, "Can a leopard change its spots?" if the above is correct then the answer in Microsoft's case seems to be "No." Here's the url: http://blogs.computerworld.com/microsoft_bribes_again
so it will "see" 256 cores but will it actually use them in an efficient manner?
Oh, hell, how about the features promised for Cairo? This is their third iteration of the standard bait-and-switch; any announcement of ridiculous new features in Windows that doesn't append "Windows has a long history of selling vaporware it never had a chance of shipping" (as this one does) isn't worth the bits it's made of.
But it would at least be nice if someone pretended to remember all the vaporware we were promised for the last couple of big releases.
I'm glad there's a non-Silverlight link, as well, but isn't it astonishing how quickly "this technology will make your web browsing experience niftier!" shades into "something that was possible before is now impossible unless you install our crapware!"?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I see they are caring enough to put in one of the only formats the Ipod will play.
I demand .ogg !!!
Sigh, first off, it was 640kb of ram, and second off it's not even his quote. And additionally I'm not sure who really said it, but it wasn't Gates.
Can you support your claim - with anything at all? Seeing as how DOS and the first versions of Windows developed, I'd say he definitely did say that 640KB should be enough for everyone.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
"What do you mean, 256 cores is not enough for our computations? We need Windows 7, that's new, right? And it is supported by Microsoft. What do you mean, Linux is supported by community and some companies? We can't trust the community, they might be not reliable. And anyway, what use is a computer if you can't play minesweeper? What do you mean, there is minesweeper for Linux?" And so on...
No ascii art.
Erm, they also gave out disks, and some have installed it on lower hardware. See here where they install it on a Celeron lappy. Microsoft demonstrated it running on a netbook. I can't remember where, but I recall reading a review of Windows 7 where they installed it on a laptop with 1 gig of ram, and said it ran as smooth as XP on the machine.
Not to mention, giving out a laptop with known devices and hardware for a pre-beta built isn't exactly out of the ordinary. That way Microsoft can ensure that all the devices and drivers on that laptop are actually supported (remember: PRE-BETA). Not to mention the specs for those computers aren't exactly out of the ordinary now, and will be either standard or 'underpowered' two years from now when Windows 7 will be released.
But your point is moot anyway, since they've already given out installer discs, and people have installed it on a variety of hardware and still were impressed with the performance.
"I think we can all agree, 256 cores is enough for anybody." Don't say that, remember the need for himem.sys?
I've got to say, who cares? What about "standard" 1-2 core machines that 99% of users own? How efficient/fast will it run on those?
I must admit my bias here: I upgraded to Vista from XP when I bought a new laptop last year. The computer I was using previously was a 4 year old Centrino, running XP. My brand-spanking-new laptop had a dual-core Pentium (with each core faster than the single core in my old one) and it ran SLOWER than my 4 year old PC. I couldn't believe it! I eventually "upgraded" to XP on my new computer, and what do you know? It ran about 2-3 times faster. I couldn't believe it.
(Please note that when I'm comparing speeds here, I'm talking about apparent running speed, not benchmarks or anything. I mean how fast the system boots, opens programs, handles multiple apps running at the same time, how often it grinds the HDD, etc.)
So the real question is not how well it will scale on monstrous servers... but will it be snappy/efficient on a single computer? Because their last "upgrade" certainly isn't.
The only problem solved here, for the vast majority of windows users, in one created by Microsoft in the first place -- code bloat. Microsoft OSs are overblown, poorly designed, and poorly implemented. (Yes, I have worked at Microsoft in a technical capacity on their OSs and LAN.) Intel went with multi-core simply because they could no longer create a "next generation" single core for people to "step up" to -- as in buying a new computer. When one looks at an analysis of what most PCs are used for, a single core is fine IFF you have decent code to execute on it. An efficient design and implementation of the OS would would outperform any version of Vista (including 7) or XP. When the OS is the key product itself (as in MS Windows)rather than the base for efficiently running applications it becomes a detriment to the user and raises cost of hardware, software, and maintenance. Ask yourself, when was the the last time a Microsoft upgrade made your applications perform faster, require less resources, or made you more efficient? All we are seeing with the change to multi-core is the need to buy more Microsoft crap to use ever more complex hardware (cpu, in this case.) What we are seeing is the continuation of Microsoft and Intel telling us how great it is to give them more money. We need to buy new PCs because Windows requires more computing power because Intel requires more Windows. The fact our apps do not run any faster on the new hardware doesn't matter. The fact that upgrading the computer requires an upgrade of the OS does -- as in paying the Microsoft tax. Multiprocessor/multi-core system are needed for certain types of tasks -- they work for problems that are best solved by single instruction/multiple data and multiple instruction/single data architectures. Neither of these architectures are required by the vast majority PC users. The additional complexity required for parallel processing gives no Windows OS performance benefits to the average user nor will s/he see any improvement in the execution of their apps. What we should be looking at is task dedicated processors (as in ubiquitous computing.) For example, two of the most common tasks are spreadsheets and word processing. Put on the silicon a processor designed specifically for spreadsheets and a processor specifically for word processing combined with a processor for traffic control. Each task could be isolated (security!) Dedicated opcodes for each processor would increase efficiency as they could be tailored to the task at hand. I could go on but I'm tired so... BTW: I've been working on hardware and software since 1980. My last major project (as architect) was a software defined radio that was required to boot from power off to transmit in 2 seconds. This included a windowing interface and proprietary networking between as many as 15 transmitters and 15 U/I control units. I know what I'm talking about :)
... with 254 of the cores being used for DRM.
*Fires up Windows 7*
*Boot Screen: Tink tink! x 256*
OH GOD!!! 256 Clippy processes!!! AARARRGGHHHHH!!
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
For most Windows users this will be meaningless. Just more confusing hype vendors and MS can throw at them to get them to buy new hardware which they really won't need. When the average user spends most of their computer time browsing, writing emails or letters, what good will this be to them, even if they do have the latest hardware?
Windows has problems running on one processor....now we can get 255 times the problems with Windows 7...yeah Microsoft thats a good idea...
The holocaust didn't happen either.
The whole issue is stupid anyway.
First, if you're claiming that Gates did say that 640KB should be enough for everyone, it's up to you to prove it by providing an actual citation. You can't expect someone to prove that he didn't say it (as they say, "you can't prove a negative").
Second, if someone did say "640KB should be enough for everyone", it was true at the time it was allegedly said. The quote doesn't say, "for all time", does it? I read the quote as "640KB should be enough for everyone at this time and for the next few years". So this whole thing is silly.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
256 core enough.... for now.
"I think we can all agree, 256 cores is enough for anybody."
Quoted for posterity.
256 cores may not be "enough for anybody". Until now, every time I bought a new PC at the end of its 4-5 year life cycle, my scientific fortran code ran an order of magnitude faster. For an n-cube model, each doubling of the number of data requires nearly an order of magnitude more speed. Clock speeds seem to have reached a practical limit due to power requirements. Where are my next few orders of magnitude going to come from, if not lots of cores?
goes to 11...
Windows 2000 or NT4
8 cores is what you can currently buy. It goes wihtout saying that in the future more cores will be available. Exponentially so. Intel made a prototype of an 80 core chip last year.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060926-7840.html
A 256 core capacity would handle about 3 of those with a few to spare. By the time they develop (or put to market) anything larger than that, the next verison will be out.
It doesn't matter how many cores a Linux system can support. Don't forget that a large portion of the market uses Windows for their SQL database management, application clustering and hosting, and networking serverside. Building up a Linux bsed hosting system that can handle this for many companies simply isn't a cost effective option. Windows lets them plug and play and crash. If you can use more cores, it makes things that much better.
On the side, administrating a Linux server is much less of a headache. Unless you're trying to get it to use all of your 1024 cores effectively.
"Windows 7" will 'scale' to 256 cores like "Windows 386" 'scaled' to 256 DOS boxes. BtW, if they call it "Windows 7", does that mean it is 379 versions behind Windows 386?
Actually, WIN386 was a very good hack. Try running it on a 3GHz P4 with 4GB RAM; it screams.
FTA, "One very important change in Windows 7 kernel is the dismantling of the Dispatcher Spin Lock and redesign and implementation of its functionality into separate components."
IIRC, Linux's multi-processing was hampered by a global spin lock in 2.4. One of the major changes in 2.6 was the replacement of a global spin lock with a number of finer grained spin locks, like they're doing now w/ Windows 7.
I'm not a kernel developer, so please excuse me if any of this is wrong. I believe a spin lock is a way of saving "I need exclusive access to this part of the system". With a global spin lock "the system" is pretty much everything, so the computer falls back to essentially a single processor when the global spin lock is locked. With a finer grained spin lock, you can lock only certain things, like a single segment of memory.
Citizens Against Plate Tectonics
"Seems like they learned from their mistakes with Vista, and now that they have a stable, solid kernel (whether you'd like to believe it or not), a lot of the headaches from Vista's development are simply not there."
The headaches from Vista's development were because they wasted 3 years trying to rewrite the kernel and had to scrap all of it and do a full reset...they had a (relatively) stable solid kernel the whole time...it's just that they didn't try to rewrite it this time around.
I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
Microsoft scales Windows 7's processor recognition capability in preparation for the ratio of 1:1; 1 core to every system service it will run. As if almost 150 wasn't enough in Vista... This OS better be able to make me coffee in the morning...
"In the kingdom where everything dies, the sky is mortal."
From 0x100 to 0x1000. One order of magnitude.
There's a difference between knowing about a bunch of CPU cores and actually being able to scale up to use them.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Finally some valid proof! Now on to big foot and the lochness monster.
You can't take the sky from me.
No he's not that stupid and never was... it's called "Planned Obsolescence" and has always been one of their business strategies. Upgrade treadmill as well. Give everyone just enough headroom that the short-sighted buy into it, then are stuck upgrading their entire infrastructure every few years.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Solaris 10, no modifications necessary to run on a 5440 - quad cpu, 8 core per cpu - 32 cores, 8 execution threads per core equates to 256 execution threads (treated as cpus by solaris)...
Granted this is chip multi-threading combined with many cores to reach this point, but it's there...
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
"I think we can all agree, 256 cores is enough for anybody."
I'm going to bookmark this post, then check back here in twenty years. Hopefully it will be good for a laugh.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
The current (albeit non-x64) state of the art chip is already at 64 threads per chip (SPARC CMT) and multi-chip systems are possible. So Windows 7 is ready for a 4 chip system.
Of course, it will take awhile for the x64 family to catch up, but they will; and quite probably within the lifespan of Windows 7. So it's a sensible target ...
As others have noted, Solaris is far ahead on the scalability front ... but that really isn't the point. Microsoft is aiming for where they expect "desktop" computers to credibly be within the next few years, this is a big vote for multithreaded or multicore processors in the volume space. That is newsworthy.
^H means backspace, I believe
What kind of shit-site is linked to?
"Microsoft Silverlight may not be supported on your computer's hardware or operating system. "
When going to that site http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Mark-Russinovich-Inside-Windows-7/
it suggests Install Silverlight !
then when coming to http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/resources/install.aspx?mode=sysreq&reason=unsupportedplatform
So those claiming that Silverlight were only needing JavaScript (Ajax) on the client-side were lying!
Kepp your shitty site!
Speaking of, if we're having support for 256 cores (which I don't feasibly see a desktop reaching for at least 20 years), how much RAM is there going to be support for?
I sure hope it's more than something like 32 gigs. If you can support an insanely high number, do it.
Then again, maybe having a lower number (like 16 gigs) would just be planned obsolescence on their part.
As an aside, is there any way to increase the 4GB RAM limit in XP Pro without upgrading to 64 bit edition?
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
That's exactly how Sony used PS2 marketing to crush the Dreamcast before it was even released, even though early titles such as Ready 2 Rumble for PS2 were a lot better on the Dreamcast, and PS2 launch titles were mostly crap while Dreamcast already had an excellent library of top games.
Twinstiq, game news
Windows becoming "aware" of 256 cores doesn't mean anything, unless it *actually* uses it... after all I'm sure windows is aware that its a crappy Os compared to what else is out there, but has anything changed?
Show me a server-based, commerical-grade OCR engine built for doc management professionals that multithreads and runs on something other than Windows and I might agree with you. Until then, I'm sticking with ABBYY.
n/t = no text
s/ONE/TWO is from the text editor vi (and now vim). It's one way to replace text with other text when in escape mode. vim is a popular text editor.
^H is a backspace control sequence.
Most of the long acronyms can be typed directly into the wickedpedias as they have pages (or at least redirects).
HTH (Hope This Helps)
n/t means "no text," and is commonly used in subject lines when there is no message in the body.
First, if you're claiming that Gates did say that 640KB should be enough for everyone, it's up to you to prove it by providing an actual citation. You can't expect someone to prove that he didn't say it (as they say, "you can't prove a negative").
The way DOS and Windows (prior to Windows 386, the daddy of Windows 3.1/3.11) were handling memory is evidence that he probably did. It's circumstantial, but overwhelming.
Second, if someone did say "640KB should be enough for everyone", it was true at the time it was allegedly said. The quote doesn't say, "for all time", does it? I read the quote as "640KB should be enough for everyone at this time and for the next few years".
I agree with that.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
The reason they have so many versions is that people tend to buy the most expensive version they can afford, so they want to squeeze the maximum number of dollars out of people. In other words, they won't give them up just because customers dislike them.
In the mean time, I'm tagging this story "yeahright" because I really doubt that a feature like this will make it into the final version unless it's hobbled somehow. They promised to put all kinds of stuff into Vista, then cut most of it at the last second.
But what's left over for the rest of the OS besides the desktop???
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
SGI's NUMA systems did support 1024 processors in 2006 running Linux and on IRIX way before that.
I struggle to see a role for Windows any more. The only people that buy it are IT managers who can't be arsed to migrate to a mixed Linux/Mac environment and retards that get it with their PC and put up with crap performance, viruses and disfunctional UI.
I think Windows will still have a has a 75% share by 2015 - such is the nature of monopoly and the declining importance of the OS... why swop when you an launch a browser/office and do everything you need to.
i will never use Windows ever again after buying a macbook, macbook pro, iphone, ipod and reformated 2 x pentium 4s with gOS.
Give someone a top of the line laptop to keep for free and you're likely to get lots of glowing reviews.
It's a classic conflict of interest.
Bavarian Purity Law of Rice Krispie Squares: Rice Krispies, Marshmallows, Butter, Vanilla.
.
Entry level for a 64 Bit Vista laptop with a 2 GHz Intel dual core CPU and 4 GB RAM is $812 at Walmart.com: Laptops-4 GB RAM
Walmart.com lists 25 dual-core laptops with 4 GB of RAM.
18 run 64 Bit Vista.
It's become trivially easy to meet Vista's hardware requirements as a mass market price.
64 Bit Vista is mainstream today.
The day after tomorrow, the quad core CPU will be everywhere, the Blu-Ray drive will be a burner, and systems sporting 8 GB RAM will scarcely seem unusual.
There is a problem with your argument. You are thinking in terms of a monolithic operating system. They could keep everything on the installation disks and only install the parts that are desired (like Linux is). If you later on needed another service you could put in in with what is on the installation disk.
That can be indeed the source where it is turned into "640k should be enough for everybody" Most likely he has said the same to many people. Not everything was always written down. Sometimes things are written down much later either from rememberence or from others.
That makes it not so much a litteral quote, but more an idea.
So in 1981 he said that 640k would be enough for everybody for the next ten years. After 6 years it wasn't anymore, so during 4 years there was a moment where he had claimed that 640K was enough and it wasn't.
For me with the above it is clear that he has said it, even if in other words.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
It would be considerably more interesting if Windows 7 offered an out-of-the-box processing abstraction on top of GPGPUs, PhysX type accelerators, and other non-traditional "cores".
Most enthusiast PCs and increasing numbers of mainstream PCs have been running a multi-core video card for a while now - it would be nice to see the development interface to these standardized, so one didn't necessarily have to learn e.g. CUDA.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
You have a very, very flawed understanding of "orders of magnitude". While 256 *2 *2 *2 *2 might be 4096, that has nothing to do with the fact that 256 and 4096 are _one_ order of magnitude apart. Unless you count in binary, which we're not.
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
32bit Windows XP also supports NUMA
Of course it does. How else would Gary Brolsma have become a minor web celebrity?
http://pohl.ececs.uc.edu/~adam/multicore.PNG Why is this such a big deal...?
Any OS that must be aware of how many cores it is running on is obviously doing it wrong. Does an OS have to be aware of how fast (in Mhz) the processor is running? What happens when processors reach 1000 cores or more? Will Windows choke at that point?
I thought most people would get the joke without spelling it out. - Submitter.
Well, he's repeatedly denied saying it, and reporters aren't notorious for accuracy. Still, at one time he was reported to have said it, and it was a long time before he started denying it.
To be fair, at the time he said it, and for several years following, it WAS true...especially in the sense that nobody could afford to have that much RAM. Unfortunately it lead to architectural design issues in MS-DOS software that took a long time to work around...so the quote became both notorious and denied.
As to whether it was an accurate quote ... just about anyone who claims to know is fooling himself. And this may include the person to whom the quote is attributed. Memories are fallible.
As to whether I believe Gates said it... Yes. It's right in line with other things he was saying at the time. But that sure isn't proof.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
In time, "I think we can all agree, 256 cores is enough for anybody." is going to be mentioned in line with, "640K ought to be enough for anybody." This will, of course, come about when we start having a core for each thread.
Truth, Just Us, And Hatred For All Mankind!
> I think we can all agree, 256 cores is enough for anybody.
And much like Gate's unfortunate prediction regarding memory usage, in 25 years, this quote will be included at the end of millions of e-mail messages as "evidence" of how silly people were at the beginning of the 21st century.
Jesus man, don't mention windows and awareness in the same title! I almost had a fit.
windows Vista?
Is XP Pro really limited to just 4GB? (I really don't know). Intel introduced PAE back during the Pentium Pro, IIRC, which should allow for 64GB of OS ram (a process is still fundamentally limited to 4GB, because its pointers are 32bits, which can only address 4 billion unique addresses...)
"I think we can all agree, 256 cores is enough for anybody." "640K ought to be enough for anybody."
"I think we can all agree, 256 cores is enough for anybody." Some time from now, this comment might be as archaic as the '640K of RAM' blooper. It all depends on how powerful the cores are and how many threads you want to run.
Wake me up when they announce WinFS.
Ceterum censeo Microsoft esse delendam.
It has been attributed to Gates since 1990s at the very least (definitely pre-95; I think it was an supposed to be a ~83-85 comment). About two years ago some bloke tried to find out the actual speach/conversation Gates was supposed to have said it in but nothing could be found in the lecture. Other recordings were searched but no one came up with any hard and fast evidence that Gates had been so unperceptive. It then became the conclusion the joke was referring the hard limit originally built into Dos (and the bios I believe though that could have just been the hard drive size limited to 540Mb) that was blamed on Gates... not that Gates had said so.
It wasn't planned obsolescence as Dos 4,5 & 6 (possibly 3) all had tricks to get around the memory limit. Actually I think all Windows up till the nt series had the limit still there just 'hidden' with dos.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
Linux also doesn't have to spend 18 months and millions of dollars finding just the right "startup sound". It's just not fair.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I don't think "it doesn't suck" is reason to roll out an upgrade to a perfectly good OS (which, after SP2, XP is), or for end users already using XP to buy it.
The reality is, Microsoft is no longer a growth company due to its market share (what a problem to have!), so the boys in Redmond have to force "upgrades" on their pre-existing installed base. There simply aren't enough new computers being bought with pre-existing products (XP, Office) for MS to make its needed financial goals. So it rolls out a forced upgrade.
In sum, Vista is an operating system that MS needs you to buy, not one that you need to buy. Again, why upgrade?
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
A real Immmortal Poet would know that the meme has more power than the history. It has been repeated often enough to become true.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Apple has it pretty close to being right. There's OS X, and there's OS X Server. Period.
The Windows Home/Business split implies that a machine only has one use, and that "home" users never need to connect their notebook to networks or Exchange servers, or that business users never take them home or want to listen to music while working, watch movies while on the road, and so on.
One version, perhaps with installation options for things like Solitaire and FreeCell, would do just fine.
(I could see a stripped version for OEMs for kiosks, cash registers, and other dedicated systems, but that's not a "public" version.)
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Yeah, don't forget Windows Standard Server, Windows Web Server, and Windows Enterprise Server. And the OEM versions. Multiplied by the various versions with differing numbers of CALs.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
HPC is also not trending toward Windows even though Steve Ballmer thought it would.
We can speculate about why, but I do so like that first graph link. I wonder if desktops are going to swing like that, or if laptops are beginning to take that curve.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Well, when you consider the GPU(s), this is already not enough; my desktop box has 260 processing cores.
Does anyone know for certain if it's 256 cores or 256 processors?
There's a big difference. ;) The Microsoft article says processors?
... how many cores are required?
But that's only 45 different products. How is Microsoft ever going to make a profit with so little product differentiation?
Per-node and per-app(let) monthly licensing is the way to go! That's how you make buck.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Call me when they remove activation on business versions.
I know where I work, we won't touch Vista because of the activation crap they pulled on business customers. If Windows 7 has the same thing, It's either stay with XP or find another OS to use.
No business in their right mind will install an OS where MS can pull the plug if some Virus pulls the VLK from an infected PC, posts it on a Warez site and all hell breaks loose.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
The hardware was only supporting 640k (ignoring XMS & EMS) at the time. Was DOS and Windows supposed to support non-existent hardware for some reason? geez.
It seems that Microsoft may have permanently "loaned" $2,000 laptops with 2.4GHz Intel dual cores + 3GB ram to the "reviewers" to review Windows 7.
I think you are focusing on the specs and not on the "permanently loaned" portion of this statement. MS gave out some very nice laptops and basically said: "Here you go, tell us what you think of your new free laptop... with Windows 7!" Where I come from, we call this a bribe.
I'd love to see a benchmark showing the incease in application performance (say on a TPC benchmark) going from even 128 to 256 cores on Windows 7 compared to say, Solaris, RedHat Linux and IRIX. Unless there's some awesome new magic going on in Win7, Microsoft is well known to be below the curve in actually making use of those extra cores/cpus compared to the aforementioned OSes.
pithy comment
Only when you draw a line in the sand will people rush to cross it. - me.
Actually 256 seems kind of low to me. I've seen 256 cores running on a server (IBM x3950) in our lab. 4 socket server x 4 cores CPU x 2 Hyperthreads (they each count as a core to the OS) x 8 servers in a scaled configuration = 256. With 6 core cpu coming soon and I'm sure 8 or more are coming soon, they better up the number. These servers have been shipping for over a year.
It's nice that Windows 7 will be 256 core aware. I can just imagine the message in the event log:
We're aware that you have 256 cores, but you didn't pay enough money to use them all. Please contact Microsoft Support, and have your credit card ready.
I'm sure they'll allow you to use the first four cores for free. That's just to get you hooked.
> s/ONE/TWO is something from some coding language, meaning substitute TWO for ONE.
It's from more than one source. Perl is probably the best-known language that uses this substitution operator, but I think Larry got the syntax from an older Unix tool (sed or awk or something like that), and there are other things that use it as well.
HTH.HAND.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Oh, and...
s/(TWO)/$1 . chr(47) . ";"/e;
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
When I feed people or eat I generally provide enough for them (or me) and consider that enough for anybody that way no one leaves the table hungry. I don't think I would say that and have someone interpret it as me saying that it was enough food for them to last forever. Seems some people have assumed such or just made shit up as they went along.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
"I think we can all agree, 256 cores is enough for anybody." The hell you say, buddy!
I think that Microsoft ought to take a play ("believe-it-or-not") from their OLD Windows 3.11 series... what "play" is that?
USE MORE INLINE ASSEMBLY CODE SPECIFIC TO THE x86 CPU FAMILY IN WINDOWS, rather than C/C++ code (that was for the days when Windows NT 3.5x, the last of the lot that could do so in fact iirc, was ported to OTHER cpu family platforms) mostly... IF NOT DUMPING MORE OF WINDOWS 7 CODE INTO PURE ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE (not just using inlined assembly blocks inside C/C++ codeblocks, which the ASM directive in many compilers allows), as much as possible, rather than C/C++
Why? Simple - better, faster performance out of Windows 7 would result!
MS has long since dumped out support for processor families OTHER than x86 (NT 3.5x used to support RISC mips, PowerPC, & other cpu families - here is where using the "intelligent assembly language" HLL (Higher Level Language) in C/C++ helped - makes for QUICK ports, processor family to processor family via its extensive usage)... but, from what I understand?
Windows 3.x had TONS more x86 CPU family specific code in it (as did say, the VB 3.0 runtimes, for BETTER PERFORMANCE) than more modern versions of Windows do, especially of the NT-based tree, from what I recall...
( &, there is little question that, though C (& yes, even C++ to a lesser extent) is fast (Delphi competes well with it by the by, better in many cases than MSVC++ in fact (on a side note)))?
ASM code IS FASTER, hands down, than C/C++ are - NO questions asked.
Were I MS?
With their BILLIONS??
I'd pay their teams to start @ least using more "inlined assembly" in their source (if NOT pure assembly language code vs. C/C++ where possible & prudent) for Windows NT-based variants (VISTA & Windows 7) because they ONLY RUN ON x86 CPU architectures now...
This? This makes sense, to get BETTER/FASTER performance out of Windows 7.
Not saying, though it WOULD be nice, to dump more of it into PURE ASSEMBLY for x86 (this would be a LOT of work most likely, quite possibly more than is needed doing inlined asm blocks inside C/C++ code blocks), but, @ least use a trick that many compilers have (especially C/C++ ones, & even Delphi had):
The ASM directive!
(It's for "inlining" pure assembly code for the x86 CPU into codeblocks of Higher Level Languages like C/C++ which is what Windows NT-based OS are MOSTLY written up in, in their sourcecode).
That'd help performance, quite a bit... imo, @ least, because VISTA needs that (&, odds are, so will Windows 7).
APK
P.S.=> Just an idea, & not THAT "easy to implement" but, with a compiler's CPU watch window open, & that ASM directive? It's NOT that damned difficult to do either, especially for a 'whizkid/master' of Assembly language (such as MS' own MASM) & a company that has billions @ its disposal, for MS to produce a faster version of VISTA in Windows 7... food 4 thought, that is... again, especially since Windows "cross cpu platform days" are LONG-GONE, with Windows NT 3.5x being the last of THAT lot iirc/afaik... & Windows now being x86 cpu family specific! apk
Finally, a version of Windows that is compatible with my IBM PS/2 Model 25 that came with 256-color MCGA!
|/usr/games/fortune
If you're gonna do something do it right - 256 cores of the blue screen of death!
Search for "bill-gates-1989.mp3" and listen to that. It is Bill addressing a class at a University and somewhere in it he describes how *he* decided on the memory layout for the PC. I believe this is where the quote comes from.
Windows 7 requirements:
* 4GB RAM
* 300GB Disk space
* 128 CPU Cores
* 2x NVIDA X video cards
XP ran like shit on less than 64MB of RAM, so why is Vista bashed for having the same comparative requirements?
Are you seriously claiming it's acceptable for an operating system to run like shit with fewer than 64 MB of RAM?
they could scale up to 257 if they'd realize that a 0-core machine could be ignored...
Why thats a whopping 2.5 k of memory per core!
lol: You see no door there!
ohhh. _cores_ not colors...! well. sorry
Finally something smart to come from M$ in a long time....I would keep a close eye on this 5 years from now, where all motherboards come with 10 to 20 processors each....its the only way to keep
De Morgans law going...
Well, with Windows 9, we could have 1Gc (One gigacores)!
It's about frickin' time!!!!!
Microsoft has announced they will support user processes on up to 4 separate cores. All others will be used for 'OS' purposes.
s/ONE/TWO is from the text editor vi (and now vim). It's one way to replace text with other text when in escape mode. vim is a popular text editor.
Buh? s/ONE/TWO is a REGULAR EXPRESSION. It's not "from Vim". Educate yourself: http://www.regular-expressions.info/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression
Here's a cookie... *psst* it's MAGIC
256 CPUs? Geeze.. and "640k memory ought to be enough for anybody" -Bill Gates
Obama = Socialism.
Flamebait? WTF?
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
The 'Mixed' share is potentially frightening. I wager mixed reflects Windows success in terms of being on some nodes. It's not all Windows, but it may be an indication of things being entirely bad for MS in this market.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I sure hope it's more than something like 32 gigs. If you can support an insanely high number, do it.
In the 64-bit version, yes. IIRC its 32GB for the desktop versions.
As an aside, is there any way to increase the 4GB RAM limit in XP Pro without upgrading to 64 bit edition?
No. MS had a version of XP that allowed you to flip PAE on, but that was like XP sp1 I believe, so only a brief period.
The problem is that a large percentage of consumer-level drivers puke and die if they encounter a PAE situation. This (reportedly) caused such a support nightmare for MS that they just shut off the ability to use PAE in 32-bit windows.
Mind you, even XPx64 allows a relatively large amount of memory, something like 32- or 64GB.
Actually, to be pedantic s/foo/bar/ is from ed, which of course vi was based on.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
If these goons can't work it out between them then it's going to be hard to track down.
http://www.collude.biz - Ignore this, it's for Project Honey Pot.
I overreached. While the object filesystem was pushed back to WinFS and still hasn't been delivered, the rest of it has, in fact, been rolled out. Egg on me.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca