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Microsoft To Switch Focus To Windows 8 In July 2010
An anonymous reader noted a bit from Ars saying Microsoft will be switching internal focus from Windows 7 to Windows 8 in fiscal year 2010. Microsoft's fiscal year starts in July, which is only eight months away. According to Microsoft's roadmaps, the release of Windows 8 is scheduled for 2012."
What can Windows 8 do that can't be done with Windows 7?
128 bit, I think we heard previously.
No, we heard that someone was ensuring the Windows codebase was 128bit safe, not that Microsoft was targetting 128bit architectures. People made the same mistake in that story as well...
So going to 128 bits wouldn't help?
Addressing DRAM is not the problem 128-bits is being considered for.
128-bit addressing is being considered right now for the off chance that a technology like PRAM catches-on. Once you have non-volatile RAM at much higher densities than typical DRAM, you can ditch the hard drive altogether.
This poses a problem, because disks and SSDs are currently I/O mapped and accessed via an SATA controller, which adds latency. But what people don't realize is how much memory-map space this arrangement saves us: consider that you can access TERABYTES of data in a device that requires less than 100MB of your memory map. And you don't typically care about the added latency, because the speed of disks is many orders of magnitude slower than DRAM.
Now, imagine the disk is replaced by something just as capacious, but also just as fast as DRAM. PRAM in the capacities to rival a hard disk would likely need to be direct memory-mapped I/O to achieve good performance, and for that we really need to consider 128-bit addressing, because current hard disks (single disk and storage arrays) are already pushing those respective 40 and 52-bit limits.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Well, I skimmed the replies and found an important point missing, concerning how Windows 8 will be marketed: If Windows 8 is going to be released in 2012, that means that sometime in late 2011, Microsoft will start telling us that Windows 7 is, in fact, dog shit.
But Windows 8 will solve all those problems, and be faster and more secure!