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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)
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".
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.
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.
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!
Paste into VLC, mplayer etc: mms://mschnlnine.wmod.llnwd.net/a1809/d1/ch9/9/1/1/5/3/4/RussinovichInsideWindows7_s_ch9.wmv
The only useful apps bundled with Windows. Please don't mess with them, primitive as they may be.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Oh for fuck's sake, it's a joke. Why does every second post here have to prove that its poster is humour-impaired?
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.
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 ----
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."
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.
Lets see why Vista was a train wreck: A) It ran pathetically slow B) It renamed things for no apparent reasons and C) It had too much DRM and other crap. I think that anyone could have told you that it wouldn't go over too well. It wasn't because of things developed that "wouldn't go over well in the marketplace" it was the idiot Ballmer trying to push his agenda that is killing MS over developing decent software.
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.
A mature industry?!?! You tell me that making OSes that crash every few hours and have to reboot all the time is part of a "mature industry"? And I'm not just talking about Windows, I'm talking also talking about a few of the flaws that OS X and Linux have too. To use your analogy its like having a car that stalls every hour or so, and when you have more than 3 people in it stalls more often, and if you have certain luggage in the back it stalls more often too. The OS industry is not mature it no longer is a monopoly with Linux and OS X becoming popular, but it sure isn't mature.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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%.
... who read the headline as "Windows 7 to be 256 color aware".
Actually, it's only funny until thinking about it. Too bad.
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."
...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.
Because people who get the joke are going to laugh and move on. Only people who don't get the joke, or who want to make a lame follow-on joke, are going to hit the submit button. (Or people who are annoyed by the previous groups.)
Self-selection bias explains a lot about the stuff you find on the Internet.
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
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.
*Fires up Windows 7*
*Boot Screen: Tink tink! x 256*
OH GOD!!! 256 Clippy processes!!! AARARRGGHHHHH!!
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
You tell me that making OSes that crash every few hours and have to reboot all the time is part of a "mature industry"?
This is obviously your own personal problem for downloading malware or whatever. Just because you break your operating systems doesn't mean they aren't mature. My last reboot was several months ago (not due to a crash -- last crash was probably a year ago), and the last time I used Windows (2003) I actually found XP quite stable and not in need of any regular rebooting (except for security updates).
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"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.
Finally some valid proof! Now on to big foot and the lochness monster.
You can't take the sky from me.
Ask yourself, when was the the last time a Microsoft upgrade made your applications perform faster, require less resources, or made you more efficient?
Actually all three, with Vista's intelligent caching of programs into memory. Almost every program I use launches instantly, because I (like almost everyone else) have very set usage patterns, and Vista has picked up on them. And if you don't have the extra memory, it's not required.
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!
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)
.
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
Lets see why Vista was a train wreck: A) It ran pathetically slow B) It renamed things for no apparent reasons and C) It had too much DRM and other crap. I think that anyone could have told you that it wouldn't go over too well. It wasn't because of things developed that "wouldn't go over well in the marketplace" it was the idiot Ballmer trying to push his agenda that is killing MS over developing decent software.
a) What are you running it on? A P-133? If you'll remember, XP was pretty damned slow when it first came out. Slower, in fact, than Vista (comparatively speaking)
b) Like what? Are you talking about the "My Documents" to "Documents" transition? Like how XP moved your docs folder from C:\My Documents to %user%\ ?
c) Did you really expect Microsoft to not include DRM in Vista? They're in a pretty hard place; they have to bow to multiple governments demands as to what they can and cannot include in their OS. Not only that, but they'd get their arses sued off by the media companies, who would then release their own DRM stuff that would only bog Windows down even more.
Funnily enough, it's only Microsoft that's at the mercy of these organisations... I don't see Apple getting yelled at for including iChat, iMovie, iLife, Quicktime, GarageBand and iTunes with their OS. I also don't see nearly as many users bitching about the actual restrictive DRM in their OS as there are about the unintrusive (WGA notwithstanding) DRM in Vista.
Now, there's MS bashing, and there's MS bashing. I am personally sick of seeing "waaa Vista sucks" posts all over the internet. Did you know that you pay more per chip in a bag of potato chips than you do per megabyte of RAM these days?
Think about that. Suck it up and buy some more RAM and enjoy Vista the way it was supposed to be used - XP ran like shit on less than 64MB of RAM, so why is Vista bashed for having the same comparative requirements?
Why thats a whopping 2.5 k of memory per core!
lol: You see no door there!