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Microsoft Leaks Details of 128-bit Windows 8
Barence writes "Microsoft is planning to make Windows 8 a 128-bit operating system, according to details leaked from the software giant's Research department. The discovery came to light after Microsoft Research employee Robert Morgan carelessly left details of his work on the social-networking site LinkedIn. His page read: 'Working in high-security department for research and development involving strategic planning for medium and long-term projects. Research & Development projects including 128-bit architecture compatibility with the Windows 8 kernel and Windows 9 project plan. Forming relationships with major partners: Intel, AMD, HP and IBM.' It has since been removed."
Six months early... or late.
It refers to a 128 bit filesystem ala ZFS, not the whole OS.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
Who needs 128? I haven't even used all 64 of my current bits yet.
-l
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Why, is Google asking that because they're running out of addressable memory space again?
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it well worth the effort.
Microsoft is researching 128bit architectures?!?!!! That's, like, DOUBLE what's available now!! I wonder how they chose that number?!# WHAT WILL COME NEXT???????????????
Well in *my* OS, the volume goes all the way to 11!
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
has been transferred to another department - the Pit of Despair.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
Sounds fishy to me. Producing a 128 bit operating system before 64 bit is in wide use just seems like a waste of time. Of course this is microsoft so who knows by the time they have that out we may actually have 128bit chips.
We're doing five blades.
With Windows 6.1 being Windows 7, does Windows 8 actually mean Windows 7?
Fuck micro$hit
That would make Windows a 128 bit wrapper around a 64 bit implementation of a 32 bit extension for a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating system, originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor, written by a 2 bit company, that can't stand 1 bit of competition.
here.
/...
Yeah, well I'm working on an OS that'll be 129 bits!
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Windows 7 isn't even officially released and already nonsense is leaking about the next release with promises they can't keep.
FIrst let them release WinFS.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
16.8 million terabytes of RAM should be enough for anyone.
Well, that settles it, then! Why on earth would I buy a paltry 64-bit Windows 7 when a much shinier and newer 128-bit Windows 8 is right around the corner? I'd best hold off until then! Thanks, Microsoft!
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
This has been discussed on OSNews and it is most likely about the filesystem or FPU and not memory addressing.
http://www.osnews.com/story/22301/128-Bit_Support_in_Windows_8_9_
They haven't even got 64-bit mig. done / smooth for their users, and they're looking at 128-bit already? Is this some kind of a joke? Or have they just realised they've missed the 64 bit boat and they're just going to work seriously on the next step up?
Quoth Balmer, "Let's see hackers find our security holes in this address space!"
Classical MS vaporware announced right before a new Windows release. They will discuss this endlessly for a year or two, then drop it from the official feature list a year before Win8 sees the light of day.
- BSOD now in 4D (3 spatial dimensions and time, more precisely from 1988 to 2015)
- That is what requires Security Essentials to have a string sample in memory of every Windows virus/trojan before 2006
- Bill Gates finally agreed that 640k wasnt enough for everyone.
- Codenamed Windows TNG, where no bit has gone before
- You actually will need all that memory to not require swapping (unless you load more than 3 apps)
This seems like major horse poo, there simply is not reasonable general purpose architecture available for 128bit and I even fail to see a requirement for the far future. Sooner we will see shard architectures based on massive parallel multiprocessing like today GPUs but they will be per core a lot simpler than today 64bit systems, not more complex.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
Do they really need it anytime soon. Do any of the so-called 128-bit chips use anything more than 64-bit addressing.
If this actually more than some blog profile bullshit, it would seem to be more about establishing some base-line level of SIMD streaming requirements for windows.
It could be provided via "128-bit" cpus or the future compute shaders from the GPU or larrbee or wherever else ATI/nVidia take us as GPUs become more general and CPUs become more specific.
In terms of memory, 64 bits can address 18 exabytes. Even Google isn't going to be using that for a decade or so. Assuming Moore's law continues, it will be about half a century before PCs need that much RAM. Dealing with 128 bit numbers for mathematics is of limited use (if you do want to deal with them, you'll probably have a need for 256 byte and 512 byte numbers as well).
And it's not like there's been much perception of a need for 128 bit CPUs. 64 bit processors have been around since the 1960's with fairly mainstream CPUs sine the early 90s. I don't think this is like RAM. I think there's a limit to how many bits we can use.
Yeah right. Gob like the mersey tunnel.
But I'll tell you how it will end.
The final architecture EVER will be 640-bit. And that WILL be enough for everyone.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
long long long?
really long long?
Really, it is? um, NO. Win 7 64 bit is a joke, well aside from the fact that it works (for which you deserve credit)
Uh. So... what did you want it to do, if not work?
but why is there even a 32 bit version? why in 7-64 is there a program files (x86) folder? that was your kludge for working with 32 bit apps? Really?
It's been that way since XP x64. It separates 32 bit apps from 64 bit apps in the directory tree. What's the problem? You can install programs anywhere you want. Just like always. And there is a 32 bit version because not everyone runs 64 bit processors. Say, for example, the Intel Atom. Or my old original Intel dual core laptop. Oh, but I guess Microsoft should intentionally shoot themselves in the foot and not release a 32 bit version and thus lose that entire market share. Pardon me for asking. By the way, why do Linux distros insist on keeping 32 bit versions?
We'll have more on this breaking story in our 6pm bulletin.
Must I remind that no one will ever need more then 640k of RAM!?!
On what processor would this run? Intel and AMD have shown off no 128-bit CPUs at this point. There is no point in having an OS that doesn't have hardware support to back it up. You can't have a 128-bit OS on a 64-bit CPU.
Now in terms of CPU what they might be talking about is floating point precision. There is some interest in getting quad precision FP. The new IEEE 754 spec has it and there are some research apps that could use it. So that might be another area they are interested in.
However 128-bit memory addressing? No way. Even 64-bit Windows doesn't use all 64-bits at this point. I mean it implements a flat 64-bit virtual address space, but it only is setup to deal with like 2TB of actual RAM. The processors are the same way. The Core 2 is a 64-bit CPU, but only has like 40-bits of actual address lines. Reason is that nobody could actually build a system with 64-bits of RAM right now, so there's no point in putting in hardware that won't be used.
So you can't address it.
It's just a 386 pagesys for the pentium age.
No, that was Windows XP... back at the beginning of this decade. Next question.
... we will come.
1) Security. Resources can be protected by hiding them in a 128-bit address space. This avoids the need for the more expensive context switching approaches typical of CPUs/OSes today (e.g. system calls are expensive right now). Drivers, system services and userland could all exist in the same context.
2) Performance. Because of 1) an OS can be reduced to a bunch of threads all living in the same address space. Helps with simplification, context switching, TLB utilization, etc.
3) Distributed single-address space operating systems. If you want to create a distributed SASOS, 128-bits would be better (in an actual practical sense) than 64-bits. If all the RAM, file system, network objects etc across a large distributed network of servers are mapped into a single address space, and especially if no re-use is allowed, a 64-bit address space is not enough.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
There's *still* so many incompatibilities with the co-existance of 32-bit and 64-bit apps between Windows (or Linux for that matter) that already don't play nice or work without a great deal of grunt work to make it work. And there's talk and development going on for 128-bit OS? Good thing it is *exactly* what Robert Morgan claimed it to be on his LinkedIn site: Research. It's like some people try to some how motivate Moore's Law to act and function at unrealistic speeds... And a personal caveat: One more reason that social network is stupid and is a social pathogen that should be eradicated from the internet.
Whoever wrote the article has no idea what they are talking about. It'd be pointless to make a 128-bit operating system without the hardware to support it. Perhaps as others suggested it's a filesystem or some sort of SIMD support.
With 128 bit you could address:
2^128 = 3.4 * 10^38 = 0.34 10^39 or 3400 10^36 bytes
But if i got the numbering scheme with the greek letters right that would be either "Ny" Bytes or "Mu" Bytes. Which sounds stupid = bad for marketing = less profit....
Leaky Windows?
Microsoft Research does a LOT of this type of investigation and research. However, there is a world of difference between researching compatability and 'planning to add'. Whether or not he really works for Microsoft, the claim that he is in R&D makes the claim that Win8 will provide 128 bit support a major stretch. Very misleading headline.
is what I want
How's that old joke go, again? "Windows is a 32 bit extension to a 16 bit operating system designed for an 8 bit processor by a company that isn't worth two bit" or something like that?
This 128 bit operating system thing is a joke - or, more accurately, marketing nonsense. "Windows 8" is so far away at this point that it's unlikely they've slated this feature; 128 bit processors are even further away than Windows 8 might be. I say 10 years at the smallest inside.
Now, if we're talking about something other than processors, it might be a possibility (filesystem?). But I doubt it.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
PAE doesn't "hide" memory, really. You can only address 4GB (i.e. a 32-bit address space) of virtual memory at once but that can be *anywhere* across the 36-bit physical address space. As long as no individual app needs more than 4GB of memory you're (mostly) OK. The kernel can alter the mappings as it needs to poke at anywhere interesting in all of physical RAM. It's less efficient than mapping it all in at once but you can manage quite well.
In related news, razor-blade manufacturer Gillette has announced their expansion into the personal computer operating system market. When he was informed of Microsoft's plans for future versions of Windows, CEO James M. Kilts is quoted as saying, "Fuck everything, we're doing 512 bits."
I once read that it took us 30 years to figure out 8 bits then about 5 years to exhaust the abilities of 8 bits so we moved to 16bits which we exhausted in 10 years so we moved to 32bits which took us about 20+ years (this post written on a 32 bit machine which has thus far been far more reliable than the wife's 64 bit machines) to exhaust so following this logic it will take us 40+ years to exhaust 64bits. Does this then mean I can expect Windows 8 in about 2050?
Before we see a Windows 8 I'd like to see a real Windows 7. What they call Windows Seven is actually Windows 6.1, a glorified Windows Vista. Type in "ver" in a command prompt to check out. Don't get me wrong, I've be using Seven since the RC and I quite like it. It's a real improvement over XP and Vista. But I still think it's overrated and the name is actually just a marketing thing.
The discovery came to light after FORMER Microsoft Research employee Robert Morgan carelessly left details of his work...
According to Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenndale_University
this University isn't even accredited!!
It's been an inside joke in our group, but after finding important programs under C:\Windows\SysWOW64, we were hoping the next one would be C:\Windows\SysDAMN128
Maybe they mean optimizing windows kernel using SSE2 instructions (xmm registers are 128-bit wide)? It improves performance of many memory transfers, and currently and makes a lot of sense in quite a lot of applications - even the kernel itself.
Will this implement Winfs the file system which to my knowledge vista was suposed to have?
If we just move to 512bit, then we can have a bit for every atom in the universe. that'll solve any address space issues.
But really, there's only 2 reasons that I can think of for "bits" #1. address space. 64bit is plenty for a LONG time #2. computation. Who needs 128bit integers to represent real world objects?
If it is true, I suppose that Windows the 8th will be published in a far future. I do not know a 128 bit achitecture that is also commercial. The same fact for Windows Vista delay.
Shared memory space among lots of computers, using IP (possibly IPv6) as a protocol.
That's probably what they are referring to if they mean 128 bit address space (not datapath).
Working in high-security department
Any one else notice the irony of entering such a phrase and following it with proprietary information?
You don't need 128 bits for addressing. 2^32 is "only" 4 gigabytes, which was always achievable in theory and actually achieved in practice over a decade ago.
Having a memory — RAM or disk — above 2^64, however, is not achievable in even in theory... 2^64 is only 100 times less, for example, than the estimated number of sand-grains on Earth.
Being able to process as much as 128 bits in one CPU-instruction is nice, and SSE extensions allow that. But neither size_t nor off_t need to exceed 64 bits. Ever... In fact, in the amd64 instruction set, only 48 bits can be used to address memory — the rest are for the CPU instruction, so that both the operation and the operand fit in one 64-bit word. The amd64-architecture is thus "limited" to 256 TB — that's the largest RAM an amd64-machine can have and the largest file and amd64-machine can mmap.
64-bit systems were truly useful, because — by making size_t and off_t the same, they allowed software to be rid of having to segment access to files, which could, potentially, be too large to memory-map in their entirety (many legacy mmap-implementations are still limited to 2- or 4-Gb files). 128-bit systems are not adding that benefit...
(And, of course, most systems — including even the most modern Linux and BSD — still have rather poor mmap-implementations, compared to their highly-optimized read and write calls... But that's another topic...)
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Specifically current Intel Atom "Diamondville" N- and "Silverthorne" Z-series processors intended for netbooks and UMPCs, other Atoms (current "Diamondville" 230/330, and the upcoming [Q1, 2010] "Pineview" D- (replaces "Diamondville" 230/330) and "Pineview" N- (replaces the current "Diamondville" N) series Atoms are all 64-bit.
On the other hand maybe Mr Gates himself needs the floating point precision in order to balance his check book? I once read a story of how the IRS had to rewrite their software and upgrade some hardware in order to do his taxes a few years back. Not that I believe that story completely, but you have got to question why the average person, not running a home brew Cray tower, would need that kind of system. Maybe the LHC?
Wow! My Vista installation uses 107836866560 bits. Now we can finally have an OS that you can carry on a deck of punch cards again.
...Microsoft is planning to support 5-letter acronym hardware, even though the industry has not yet completed the migration from 3-letter acronyms to 4-letter acronyms. The 5-letter version of the operating system will support 4-letter acronyms, but will not be backwards compatible with shorter acronyms, such as the popular "CPU" and "RAM" used widely in the computer industry.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
The subject is quite stupid. What details? Probably an engineer with a thick accent told the HR manager something about 128 bit (maybe fs, maybe optimizations), and by the time it appeared on the website it went through several revisions each time by people with less and less understand of what they are writing. That's the corporate way of doing things.
Apparently, Microsoft is not expecting their Windows 7 product to be a success. Redux of Microsoft Windows Vista.
Somehow, we all managed to survive from 1984 to 1995 by swapping 64k chunks in Expanded Memory. I remember writing assembly to do it, and I personally do not miss that headache. That being said, old ideas die hard, and if we can get some larger page sizes (how about swapping that 4th GB in address space to point at a 5th, 6th, etc?), almost all reasonable applications (by today's standards) could fit in the expanded memory space.
With 128 but we could barely address half of the atoms in the universe.
We need 256 or better 512 bit systems as number of atoms in the universe is about 10^80 ~= 2^266. This way we could address everything to the last atom....but wait where do we store the addresses?
If those chaps at MS really have time to spare to add this 128 bit instruction gimmick while everyone and his dog is still stuck with 32 bit drivers then why don't they actually use that effort to do something usefull?
I for one, would love it if MS implemented some of the alternative filesystems around like ext3/4 or reiser so I won't have to rely on third party filesystem drivers to access my dualboot shared partition. Ever tried Ext2 IFS on Vista? Good luck. UAC won't allow any executables running from a third party filesystem.
The problem is caused by Vista's internals: There is some code that compares whether the name of the file system type is one of the following: "NTFS", "FAT", "FAT32", "CDFS", "NPFS", "MSFS" or "UDF". If there is a match, it is one of Microsoft's file system types and a lot of code is skipped in the Multiple UNC Provider (MUP) implementation of Vista. If the file system type is a third-party type, for example "Ext2", some code runs in the MUP of Vista that always generates an ERROR_INVALID_PARAMETER error status code due to a bug of Vista.
source
The whole point is sharing my data which means in my case it will contain a mix of warez, music, sci-fi, anime, code projects and windows and linux executables. Not being able to execute from it is unacceptable.
Turning it around would mean using an experimental ntfs driver built using a reverse engineered, patent encumbered filesystem that keeps changing with every iteration of windows.
Of course it's all in MS's interest to keep interoperabillity as low as legally possible...
Wow... I've really gone offtopic this time.
A lot of the systems I see these days throw GUIDs (128-bit integers) around like confetti, using them for identifiers on everything.
On 32-bit they suck, since they are 4 times larger than the native integer datatype. On 64-bit they suck less. I'm guessing on 128-bit native processors, they'd suck about half as much again.
There is a market for this, especially for selling Windows to entities utterly obsessed with tracking every object on Earth (basically, big corporate marketing departments and governments). Governments want to put GUIDs in banknotes. Corporations want to put GUIDs in EVERYTHING. Some of them already do.
Wouldn't it be interesting if the equivalent of the entire Internet was accessible using direct memory addressing instead of IP addressing.
Having a memory — RAM or disk — above 2^64, however, is not achievable in even in theory... 2^64 is only 100 times less, for example, than the estimated number of sand-grains on Earth
So? There are more efficient encodings than one byte per sand-grain, you know.
As it turns out, 2^64 is much smaller than Avogadro's Number, the number of molecules in a mole of a chemical compound. If you could find a way to encode information in a 3D hunk of silicon, such that you needed slightly more than 1000 atoms to store each byte, 2^64 bytes of storage would amount to a bit less than one ounce of bulk silicon, occupying less than one cubic inch.
I FULLY expect to see secondary storage approaching this density within the next few decades, and I fully expect that there will be good reasons to support it in a flat address space.
1. Definition of "leak" -- "unauthorized (especially deliberate) disclosure of confidential information".
2a. If this really was a "leak", knowing Microsoft, you can bet money it was not "unauthorized", it is/was just part of the PR/Marketing plan. As a result, it was a calculated, deliberate and authorized disclosure and not a "leak" after all.
2b. If it is a hoax, then of course "leak" makes more sense. And, on top of that, if it is a hoax, I would bet money that Microsoft had a hand in it, just to get the Microsoft and Windows names bandied about for a group ego stroking.
Of course, I might also be a tad bit cynical.
Ephebobyte
Extrabyte
Extremebyte
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Your mom.
Is this an idea so that they could compile code to a RISC like instruction set running on a GPU like architecture with many simple parallel CPU like cores? GPUs have WIDE address buses, and this is logically an extension of NVidia's CUDA.
Thats may be what is going on. Given NVidia's positioning in business wih regard to Intel and ATI/AMD, maybe this is their ace os spades play with MS.
Yes 64-bit works smooth as silk for Windows 7 as long as you mean "just Windows 7". Very few user applications are compiled 64-bit. In fact a few old installers don't handle installing 32-bit applications in a 64-bit system correctly. How many utility applications like AV are really 64-bit instead of "64-bit compatible"? Very few. In fact I won't be surprised when it turns out a few more (nasty) surprises pop up with side by side and 32-bit and 64-bit versions.
So far, everything is going swimmingly because very few pieces of software are Win64. Now lets see what happens when things like Photoshop or Word or Firefox go 64-bit and their legacy plug-ins break.
I am still waiting for a version of Windows 8 that I can run on my 4004 CPU with a 4bit storage bus....
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Unless I'm experiencing some kind of time travel anomaly, I haven't heard of any 128-bit CPUs for micros even being discussed, let alone prototyped. in fact, the only 128-bit CPU I can find any mention of is in IBM's System/370. Anyone have any info about 128-bit microprocessors. And I don't mean vector processing extensions, I mean 128-bit wide general purpose registers, 128-bit wide bus, 128 address lines, etc. a REAL 128-bit CPU. None of this 8088-style crap either: 128-bit general purpose register with 64-bit bus.
cat
GPUs have wide data buses, not address buses. Data buses 128 bits and wider have been on mainstream cpus for a while now, though GPUs still have an advantage there.
The enemies of Democracy are
Will it do Linux?
Microsoft does have a tendency to pre-announce "blue sky" projects that never see the light of day. Remember the promised Cairo OS that never came into being? Remember the promised WinFS that never seems to be released? Remember the promises to get rid of the registry? Remember the original promises of release dates for the OS that would eventually become Vista? I could go on and on and on...
If it looks like vaporware and it sounds like vaporware then it probably is vaporware.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Right, because the first thing you do when hired into a high-security department is tell everyone on the Internet what you're working on. Sounds like this guy was a dunce right off the bat.
This ranks right up there with twittering about how much you hate your boss.
Actually, the correct answer is NT3.5, and that was in the last century. Rock solid. Then they f'd it up.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I know it is more fun to speculate on what he MIGHT mean, but maybe this guy was just making up shit to get potential employers' attention... If they ask about any details, he could always hide behind the NDA he signed when working at MS... Sounds like a perfect plan.
I worked on developing synergies between IBM and Google to better facilitate the upcoming merger... When it never happens, whoops? it must have fallen through.
http://www.tomandemily.com
Robert Morgan doesn't work for research. Check this link: http://www.winfreddekreij.com/index.php?view=article&id=92:re-microsoft-leaks-details-of-128-bit-windows-8
A tadpole is a pollywog
But does it run Windows 8?
Although I didn't read the article (This is Slashdot after all!) I would bet that they are not referring to addressing lines but to data lines. It would allow data to be taken in at larger gulps. I seriously doubt that computers in the foreseeable future would need 128 bit addressing. Hell even 64 bit addressing is unlikely to be exhausted!
My ignorance. I've only looked at the netbook ones. Wasn't aware that there were 64 bit Atom processors, actually. :)
Mark Shuttleworth announces "Fuck Everything, We're Doing 256 Bits"
I call shenanigans! This supposed "leak" is obviously a marketing campaign for Microsoft.
To be fair, I was in the opposite position, having only looked previously at the 230/330 thinking about using one of those for an inexpensive Linux server at home; I wasn't aware that the N/Z models weren't 64-bit, too. I started writing GP with "Actually, the Intel Atom processors are 64-bit processors", but then decided to do some checking before I posted it.
Good luck to you Mr Morga. You're about to have yourself one hell of day!
Somehow, we all managed to survive from about 250,000 BC to 1943 without having computers at all.
64-bit processors are standard today. 32-bit processors are only of interest for legacy code and low-power portable devices. If you're running stuff that gets remotely close to needing 32 bits of address space, then there is simply no reason to even consider 32-bit platforms.
Well, kudos for checking more than I did!
What you decide on for the inexpensive Linux server at home? I was recently looking at doing something like that and ended up using my old Dell laptop (E1505), which has an original core duo (*not* 64 bit, either). Most power I've seen it eat is 65w, so it seems to be decent enough in that respect... and I was only looking for something to play music with/store files/run a web server, nothing big that would require a case and 20 hard drives.
All of those API calls that expected 64 bits will break as their 64 bit variables will be overflowed with larger numbers. Software will need to be modified and recompiled or run in yet another XPM XP Virtual Machine.
So far Windows 7 and the XP Virtual Machine uses SP3 and has limited 3D Graphics abilities, so Games will have a hard time playing old games like Warlords IV on it. Warlords IV and other games don't run on Vista or Windows 7, I am guessing because of all of the API changes and addressing changes.
In the 64 bit operating systems the 16 bit MS-DOS and 16 bit Windows software cannot run, you'd need the 32 bit version or use a virtual machine for that. Windows 7 XPM XP Mode only works with certain VT features and won't run on all systems, so some systems won't have a Virtual machine unless they run VMWare, VirtualBox, or something else like QEMU or BOCHS.
I am guessing 128 bit addressing on a 64 bit processor is like doing bank switching on the old 6502 and 8088 processors to access more RAM. It seems with each new release of Windows, more and more RAM is needed to run it faster, and Windows 8 is going to be a big memory hog that needs 128 Bit addressing to access a huge amount of RAM. Am I right?
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Too bad they're in so much shit they won't ever release windows 8 or 9
I was struck by (not severely, but enough to delay non-essentials) reduced income which has delayed that decision; I'm still leaning toward one of the "nettop" oriented Atoms (by the time I get around to it now, probably one of the new D-series ones, since I understand the 230/330 are goint to be phased out when they are introduced).
That sounds like a good choice: I'd rather keep something existing and repurpose it, but unfortunately my only operational but not otherwise committed computer is a a fairly old laptop that has some issues that make unattractive for use in a situation where it would be on for long periods of time. So I am kind of left with building fresh.
> As long as no individual app needs more than 4GB of memory you're (mostly) OK.
Yeah, but if you want to do some fun stuff, it's easy to use 6 GB of RAM in a single process. Though, to be fair, there are ways to cut that down significantly.
Had a really dorky haircut too.
Dude, the guy has somewhere over 40 billion dollars. He can have any kind of haircut he wants to have...
Picture of 128 bit CPU packaging. Actual size.
http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/bed-of-nails-3a.jpg
What's one computer? That's hardly convincing. By your own admission, 5000 servers in a datacenter run by the likes of Google or Microsoft could consume 2^64 Bytes in a year (or a few years, more realistically). See, your mistake is that you are thinking in terms of one computer, but some of the very high end systems in the world are clusters of *thousands* of computers. Granted, other than the virtual filesystem they share on some sort of SAN, which really could arguably need to be 128 bits, I suppose mostly those thousand+ computer clusters are running 64-bit OS's and they each have a relatively small 'chunk' of the data to work with.
But, maybe someone wants to come up with an operating system that shares a single address space among thousands of computers?
With Windows taking up more resources exponentially with each new version, 128 bit was the natural next step.
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
How do you spell disinformation:)
Why not focus on fixing all flaws in existing Windows??
There's a youtube video with Mark Russinovich where the
they ask why Microsoft dont re-write Windows the correct
way with known proper security from the ground up ?
Russinovich replies, "it's too much work"
So there we have it folks, Microsoft CHOOSES ON PURPOSE to
continue on a flawed and insecure and slow bloated systems.
I guess we didn't learn much from the mp/m days and the apple language card, because when memory ran short in the PC, we resisted protected mode and punted with the expanded memory. Sometimes I wonder if the same people were involved. Now using virtual memory, we are going to swap pages in the 4GB space? I am sorry we cannot seem to do things the straightforward elegant way.
If you are going to have a Sagan of memory in your machine, a longer address word is required.
If we go to a new version of IP with a larger source and destination fields (larger than four octets), router memory will be challenged once again. In fact this maybe slowing the adoption of six right now. Just think of the size of the routing tables in a world where every widget has it's own IP address. Just processing routing tables that large may be the application that pushed the clock rate up further for CPUs.
If a spaceship wants to travel out there and count all the stars and planets, it will need s a lot of memory for that. I think Windows 9 is for intergalactic space travel. Lets send Bill on the first ship with the telephone sanitizers.
I just realized that if Microsoft ports Windows into a 128-bit architecture, their errors per amount of ram will go way down. With an unimaginable amount of ram in the machine, they can continue to pile new code on top of old code until the cows come home. They can take their current operating system objects and derive yet another set of objects from them, and not even care about the footprint of software in memory. Of course hard disk speed will have to improve or loading a Windows kernel 32 times larger will take 32 times longer. This could really be a driver for technology.
While obviously unnecessery from an addressing point of view it does offer some interesting advantages in terms of security. In particular rather than bothering with expensive hardware memory protection one can simply rely on the extreme sparseness of memory usage to provide process isolation...at least if you do other things right (randomize layouts etc..)
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
How quickly we forget!
It was C that had that problem, not C++. At least not in the language we call C++ today, which has the std::string class specifically for that purpose.
And for that matter, near and far pointers could be handled in much the same way as C++ smart pointer classes. We didn't have that technology in 8086's heyday, which made near and far pointers a headache. But now we do.
Pet peeve: Profane people propagating perfunctory pedantry.
It should finally be usable by Windows 11, in 2020 or something.
Well, I have heard about 128 bit computing since I was a wee bairn and 16 bits was something you only had in your wet dreams; it has somehow failed to materialise in the market. It is probably because it is quite hard to imagine that the benefits would justfy the not insignificant complexity; even now, when we talk about "64 bit" architecture, when you read it carefully, it isn't actually quite 64 bits, as in "64 bit instruction and data buses", so I imagine this development is still some way off.
Also, we have seen that 64 bit programs don't normally run much faster than 32 bit ones.
He joined Microsoft in 2002, is he to blame for the Vista debacle?
Reliable sources informs us that Duke Nukem forever will be released in both 32, 64 and 128 bit versions.
the most article with funny mods. instead start thinking what you can do with 128 OS . maybe getting linux ready for this . it sounds cruel that Micro$oft is partnering with intel,amd and others . where linux wont have a chance to compete.
Not all of us..
Some people used architectures other than x86 which didn't need such nasty hacks.
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Just 5 more bits... I'm soooo close!
Windows is a 32-bit extension to a 16-bit graphical shell for an 8-bit operating system originally coded for a 4-bit microprocessor by a 2-bit company that can't stand 1 bit of competition.
In all fairness, life before 1943 completely sucked. I'm not saying that there's a correlation between available address space and the general suckiness of life, but I'm not saying that there isn't a correlation, either.
NT is horrible, it crashes every 3 months. That might now seem like a big deal but a good Linux / Unix install would NEVER crash once. As far as XP goes, Bad memory management, bad resource management and over all bad design. I'll grant the most stable, but that's that not saying much because it still loves to blue screen / freeze / just reboot for no reason. So like I said above, Will windows 8 finally be stable, they've had enough practice, why not apply it to design now!