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Lost Opportunity? Windows 10 Has the Same Minimum PC Requirements As Vista
MojoKid writes Buried in the details of Microsoft's technical preview for Windows 10 is a bit of a footnote concerning the operating system's requirements. Windows 10 will have exactly the same requirements as Windows 8.1, which had the same requirements as Windows 8, which stuck to Windows 7 specs, which was the same as Windows Vista. At this point, it's something we take for granted with future Windows release. As the years roll by, you can't help wondering what we're actually giving up in exchange for holding the minimum system spec at a single-core 1GHz, 32-bit chip with just 1GB of RAM. The average smartphone is more powerful than this these days. For decades, the standard argument has been that Microsoft had to continue supporting ancient operating systems and old configurations, ignoring the fact that the company did its most cutting-edge work when it was willing to kill off its previous products in fairly short order. what would Windows look like if Microsoft at least mandated a dual-core product? What if DX10 — a feature set that virtually every video card today supports, according to Valve's Steam Hardware Survey, became the minimum standard, at least on the x86 side of the equation? How much better might the final product be if Microsoft put less effort into validating ancient hardware and kicked those specs upwards, just a notch or two? If Microsoft did raise the specs a notch or two with each release, I think there'd be some justified complaints about failing to leave well enough alone, at least on the low end.
As the years roll by, you can't help wondering what we're actually giving up in exchange for holding the minimum system spec at a single-core 1GHz, 32-bit chip with just 1GB of RAM. The average smartphone is more powerful than this these days
They're forgetting that Vista ran like shite on those specs :) and NO smartphones are not more powerful, although they are close to atoms at similar speeds now.
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I have worked IT in Banking (twice) and Healthcare (once), in both neither company wanted to spend money on a desktop pc. They wanted the cheapest they could get. Businesses buy Windows. It is hopelessly annoying, but a fact of life.
If you want the PC that you've been using for the past 5 years that works perfectly well to stop being able to run the latest version of its OS well then it would be a Mac.
I think the reason the specs aren't increasing much is because the pace of hardware improvements isn't moving as fast as it used to. Nowadays, you pick up an i7 and 16Gb of RAM, your favorite video card, toss an SSD in there and you've basically hit the limit.
All we're getting these days is more cores as the whole gigahertz wars ended 10 years ago.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
Windows is an operating system. It's job is to allow other applications to be executed simultaneously. All of the resources windows consumes are resources denied to other applications. I'm not saying that we need to be stingy like in the bad old days when programmers where more concerned about saving clock cycles than writing scalable, maintainable, and reusable code. But now that we are passed all that, there is no sense in wasting cycles frivolously. Let the applications do that.
Since when is having a light-weight OS a bad thing? Haven't people been harping on MS enough for having bloated OSes?
Sure, make allowances for multiple-core and multiple CPUs on the not-so-low end, but making the minimum requirement a single CPU was definitely smart on their end.
Before we go any further, I think it'd be good to provide an example of what feature you believe Microsoft has failed to implement in order to keep the requirements low. I can't think of what that would be. Because failing the need to meet some specific requirement, I don't know why system requirements should need to keep going up, especially when you consider that we use our desktop/laptop computers for the same things as we did 10 years ago. Web browsing, word processing, spreadsheets. For games, you can support weaker/older systems and just scale the graphics down.
So unless there's a specific feature that would suck up resources, I'd actually kind of expect that an OS system requirements might go down. As code continues to be optimized, you'd get better performance on the same hardware. Of course, there's a limit to that. But why complain that the OS isn't an ever-bloating resource hog?
ThemMinimum specs for the OS doesn't hold anything back. 64-bit builds exist and "fancy" features of the UI can become disabled if certain hardware isn't available. Furthermore I'd say it points to some level of efficiency in that the OS can run on a low end system. Arguments can be made either way about whether the sheer slowness would be totally a fault of Windows or of the software you're running.
I am working for a company with 6000+ desktops. I do not understand why our client engineering is rolling out faster hardware every year. 95% of all office workers need MS office, a browser and email. Most of the home users just need a browser these days. Those core i7 are just idling around heating office space.
I have now started rolling out 200 dollar desktop hardware (zotac). Which could really become a problem for microsoft. The windows licence price tag looks really expensive with these hardware prices.
Office problems are solved, we do not need faster hardware. And microsoft is manly making money from, *drumbeat*, office workers.
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-S
You're not really "giving up" anything. You don't turn on the computer to play Operating System. You do it to run applications. So Windows requires a low overhead? Well that's great, an operating system SHOULD have a low overhead because it's supposed to get out of the way, not use resources. Your computer is a zero-sum game, memory and CPU that is taken by the OS is usually unavailable to your apps, the things that are actually important (barring, of course, apps that don't multi-thread and can only use part of the CPU, etc).
I suppose we have this fantasy of rotating windows, whiz-bang effects, SFX on the window borders on the desktop.. what do you really get from that? Anything beyond saying "oh that's cool" when you see a demo on the store shelf or a flashy yet impractical interface on a TV show? I know what I got from that -- an annoyance with Gnome 3, GPU memory reserved by the f*%^ing interface, and a lot of time spent figuring out how to turn that nonsense off (thank God Gnome's extensions make that easier to do that now than it was a few years ago!).
Maybe a simpler interface is better. Maybe an interface that doesn't try to do too much visually results in a more USABLE experience. More bells and whistles are not better.
There's no reason why an OS needs to be any larger than it is. Let the market add value to a cornerstone product. There's no reason that the Linux kernel should ever take up a gig of ram because, hey lets throw more boiler plate into it.
Microsoft has one job with Windows, and that's to make the best application shell possible for almost every possible desktop need. I think they've done a pretty good job at it, though they've fucked their UI core so badly time and time again, it feels like they're just re-arranging chairs to justify the upgrade cost.
Bye!
Have you not seen the HP Steam 7 or the Lumia 620? Both run Windows 8 and both have specs at or below the minimum for the desktop OS. There are also plenty of businesses that have pushed their PC refresh cycle out to 5-7 years so if you want them to upgrade you have to keep the minimum at what a typical business would have bought 5+ years ago.
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I think it is sad we live in a world where people still aren't shocked by the Vista requirements and want them to be higher. WTF is wrong with the lot of you?
I think this minimum spec idea misses the point. We're talking about an operating system, not an application. The OS should provide a platform (and, to a certain extent, services) upon which users will run the applications that actually get things done. The OS shouldn't have huge minimum specs because it's supposed to be relatively unobtrusive. When we start trying to load the OS down with all kinds of things that ought to be done with apps, we end up with a bloated mess, a one-size-fits-none concept that inconveniences everyone equally. I'd much rather they kept the specs low and pared some of the fluff from the OS instead.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Because there are still tablets and small laptops with less than 4 GB of RAM. For what workloads do the extra general purpose registers of x86-64 outweigh the cache hit from larger pointers?
Just to run the OS requires 1GB of ram? ...and I'm meant to be impressed with how "small" this is?
Keeping software requirements low is a good thing, and there isn't really any justification for making a basic desktop OS require good hardware if all people want to do is the same stuff they were doing ten years ago. If they wanted to weed out underpowered PCs, they should mandate an improved version of the Windows Experience Index be advertised alongside PCs with simple numbers for office and gaming performance, and maybe energy efficiency.
On the other hand, it's long past time to put 32 bit out to pasture, at least on the desktop. Remember, this OS will probably still be supported in the mid-2020s. I'm not going to want to maintain a 32 bit legacy codebase when PCs are coming with 256GB of ram standard.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
The reason the specs have not changed is because CPUs and systems in general have been capable of doing most common tasks for at least 10 years. Are the use cases for extreme power? Yes. The submitter, however, makes it sound like it's a bad thing to be able to run on a wide range of hardware, including older slower machines. Are the minimum spec machines going to be able to run Crysis? Nope. Will they run Outlook, Work, and a browser? Yep. This is a non-story.
It was less than 2 years ago that the Linux kernel dropped official support for the 80386 chip in the "current" kernel. It's successor, the 80486, has been around since 1989.
Several versions of the Linux kernel that still support the 386 are still officially supported. See http://www.kernel.org/ for details.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It has nothing to do with what is being run on these diminutive machines, it has to do with the needless complexity of supporting two architectures. The end user wouldn't know the difference, but it would lighten the burden for all software developers whether writing Windows, or software targeting Windows.
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Slackware Linux doesn't require an extremely powerful system to run (though having one is quite nice :). It will run on systems as far back as the 486. Below is a list of minimum system requirements needed to install and run Slackware.
486 processor
64MB RAM (1GB+ suggested)
About 5GB+ of hard disk space for a full install
CD or DVD drive (if not bootable, then a bootable USB flash stick or PXE server/network card)
Debian:
A Pentium 4, 1GHz system is the minimum recommended for a desktop system.
Table 3.2. Recommended Minimum System Requirements
Install Type RAM (minimal) RAM (recommended) Hard Drive
No desktop 64 megabytes 256 megabytes 1 gigabyte
With Desktop 128 megabytes 512 megabytes 5 gigabytes
Ubuntu Desktop Edition
700 MHz processor (about Intel Celeron or better)
512 MiB RAM (system memory)
5 GB of hard-drive space (or USB stick, memory card or external drive but see LiveCD for an alternative approach)
VGA capable of 1024x768 screen resolution
Either a CD/DVD drive or a USB port for the installer media
Internet access is helpful
Linux Mint 16
System requirements:
x86 processor (Linux Mint 64-bit requires a 64-bit processor. Linux Mint 32-bit works on both 32-bit and 64-bit processors).
512 MB RAM (1GB recommended for a comfortable usage).
5 GB of disk space
Graphics card capable of 800×600 resolution
CD/DVD drive or USB port
On the other hand, it's long past time to put 32 bit out to pasture, at least on the desktop.
After the RT debacle, Microsoft wants to ship the same operating system on the desktop and the laptop. And there are still plenty of laptops that come with less than 4 GB of RAM, such as the ASUS Transformer Book.
I'm not going to want to maintain a 32 bit legacy codebase when PCs are coming with 256GB of ram standard.
Just be glad Microsoft isn't Nintendo, which still has to maintain a runtime environment for its 8-bit codebase on its current consoles.
It's like the homebuilt PC market (which still sort of exists), such as Cube where the 'basic' model is little more than a motherboard into which you have buy all the extras that make it work, like RAM or non volitile SSD. It's like the new batch of $99 tablets purported to do 'everything' except of course for anything. It's like ordering a new Levovo Yoga and you discover that getting enough SSD to make it practical doubles the price.
The funny thing is that apps are so bloated and so awful that even getting the most hardware you can afford is really only the difference between doesn't work at all and runs so poorly you think it doesn't work at all. My office laptop is a Toshiba R840 with 8GB RAM and a quad core CPU, a 500GB rotating drive and between the Java shit, management apps, endpoint agents, background tasks and 'automatic' updates it's a piece of shit that spends all day thrashing its brains out.
MS is simply being lazy because if they told you what you really need you'd be forced to get a bigger machine than most people want to pay for. And after all they didn't say HOW it would run, only that would start (maybe).
The end user wouldn't know the difference
Other than that pointer-intensive 64-bit programs run more slowly than pointer-intensive 32-bit programs because of all the cache misses.
Somebody forgot to tell my Mac that, because more than six years after purchase it's still running the latest OS. I just ran an update this morning, in fact. I think we spent $35 on an upgrade once.
My Mac is no longer supported (hasn't been for a couple of releases) by OS-X because the CPU doesn't do 64-bits. It's not even 10 years old yet, and it isn't supported by OS-X.
.
It was the first Apple computer I bought. It will be the last Apple computer I ever buy.
Apple is a hardware seller. They make money on leaving old hardware behind in their software. Microsoft does not make money on making hardware obsolete, on the contrary, as long as it doesn't take them too long to support something, they make MORE money on supporting old hardware.
I see two problems with upping the system requirements for a new version of the OS.
1) (and probably most important) The "low end" may operate on slim margins, but it does sell licenses and increase penetration. I don't think Microsoft can afford to ignore this market.
2) The OS is not an application! It runs applications. For the OS to be light weight with respect to system resources is a GOOD thing, as it allows more resources to be available for applications. I'd much rather have my apps run faster than see the desktop do flashy stuff or the OS run a bunch of heavy weight services just in case I might need them someday.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Someone on Slashdot is actually complaining that Windows runs well on older hardware? We're through the looking glass here, people.
Microsoft added the requirement that the CPU must support NX which many of the old CPUs running Windows XP do not support.
Which processors? AFAIK every Intel processor since Prescott (launched 2004, 10 years ago!) has had XD/NX, even the first generation Atom had NX.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
FTFY
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In those parts where you actually care about top cache performance, if you're using a "lower-high-level" language such as C or C++, you might not even want to use pointers and rather use some custom information encoding to squeeze as much useful information into a single cache line as you can.
Ezekiel 23:20
Are you trying to claim that, for example, only bad software can be written in the Swift language because it isn't implemented anywhere but on Apple hardware?
In case you haven't noticed processors aren't getting any faster and haven't been for ages. Why would you want Windows using even more of the processor rather than letting applications use the rest?
And because of that there are still a bunch of low-end PCs being sold and people simply not upgrading because really there's no point. Microsoft upping the requirements would just cut down their market. There are too many options for them to bully people like they used to do.
Many 16 bit applications from the 1980's will run fine on Windows 10 32 bit edition.
Microsoft, more than any other company, has spent money ensuring that old software runs smoothly on newer operating systems. It is not perfect, and it has a lot of downsides, but it is also whey the corporate world and government has embraced MS as the desktop operating system of choice.
They are not going to get rid of Windows 32 on the desktop until there are almost no desktops out there that will run it. 2014 was the first year that Intel fully embraced x64 bit architecture for all of its chips. Most computers more than 10 years old are x32. There are a ton of netbooks and netbook tablets manufactured up until 2013, many that shipped with the EOL OS XP that need to be upgraded to Windows 10.
If 16-bit applications are the real problem, then perhaps Microsoft should make a Windows 3.11 for Workgroups image for Microsoft Virtual PC available to all licensed users of 64-bit Windows 10 Pro the way Windows 7 Pro came with the "XP Mode" virtual machine. But I imagine the only "16-bit applications" that most home users will be running are emulated games for the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo Entertainment System video game consoles.
Modern graphical operating systems are expected to do much more, such as render multilingual text at arbitrary sizes. Can you even fit scalable fonts for Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Bengali, Tamil, Thai, Khmer, Chinese, and Korean into two floppies?
You can use X11/Linux, but then you'll have to keep paying the retraining cost for every new employee you hire...
FUD, pure and simple. Most modern Linux DEs look and act very similar to Windows because they're designed to do the same thing. Your typical office worker doesn't need to know more about using Linux than he does about using Windows, meaning that all they need to know is which icon to click on to do what. And, most of the office software for Linux isn't constantly changing the UI, so that once it's learned, it doesn't have to be re-learned every time there's a minor upgrade. And, as far as peripherals go, stay away from the bleeding edge, and the odd are that It Just Works.
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I'm not sure exactly what we're giving up by maintaining minimum specs. Is there some rule by which raising the minimum specs improves performance on more powerful machines? Or that lower minimum specs means the OS won't run as well on the latest hardware?
I can run Ubuntu on an old 486. Does that mean it can't scale up to my i7, or that it's somehow less powerful than if they set a higher minimum?
Or is this a reaction to the fact that on the rare occasions that Mac OS has major update they always raise the minimum specs? Maybe the fact that Microsoft doesn't sell the system AND the OS together means they don't have an incentive to get us to dump our hardware when it gets to be four years old.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Just because hardware has advanced to a point where we could justify increasing the minimum specs for Windows, doesn't mean we should. I mean sports cars are constantly being re-engineered to maximize power (acceleration/speed) and minimize weight (even more acceleration and speed). Why would consumers want a computer that REQUIRES multiple cores just to power the OS? That's called software bloating and it isn't necessary or appreciated by consumers when their computer is rendered unusable a year into its lifetime. No, minimize the OS. This gives you maximum headroom for the applications that you REALLY care about that actually NEED the cpu/gpu/ram cycles. In addition to it running better across the board, it also allows it to run on the light end devices such as the phone in your pocket. When it comes to software, lighter is better... especially when you are dealing with the dang Operating System.
It's not the OS, but the applications. There is a lot of business software that only exists for Windows and sometimes a very specific version of Windows at that.
I work at a non-profit and have installed win 7 on machines with as little as 512MB ram. As long as you don't run any antivirus, they are usable and a 1GB machine is just fine for internet browsing and office apps. Now if you want to install an antivirus, you are talking 1.5GB minimum for a responsive system. I'd bet your wife's laptop had a bunch of always running corporate junkware on it and it may also have full disk encryption to deal with.
It's a 2008 Mac Pro. My employer offered to replace it with a new machine a few months ago, in fact they almost insisted on an "upgrade".
This 2008 model has two quad core Xeons running at 2.8 Ghz and 16 GB of RAM, and the latest OS (10.9.4), so there's not really much to upgrade. Since they needed to use the money as budgeted, for new computers, I accepted a laptop, a MacBook Pro Retina with 2.7 Ghz Core i7 and 16 GB RAM - the same amount of memory as the 2008 model, but plenty.
Why was there such an uproar over Metro?
Because it was different, you were presented with a simple grid of icons to launch your applications and then your applications worked exactly as they had before, very simple ... but different. The truth is the idea that "all they need to know is which icon to click on to do what", is nice in theory but doesn't fly in reality.
They just run under NTVDM, which is a bastardised version of SoftPC, as was the case since Windows NT 3.1. Ever wondered why a command /c ver returns MS-DOS version 5.0.500 under any x86 version of NT? That's why - it was the latest version of MS-DOS that was around when the version of SoftPC they licensed was written.
Have a look inside NTVDM in Notepad (or a hex editor) and you'll see:
"SoftPC-AT Version 3 (C)Copyright Insignia Solutions Inc. 1987-1992"
Fun fact: the x64 and ARM versions of Windows still come bundled with a copy of MS-DOS 8, complete with Windows Millennium copyright message. It's in DISKCOPY.DLL. They also come with icons for Lotus 1-2-3 and other obsolete programs, in MORICONS.DLL (which was from Windows 3.1, 22 years ago).
Windows is full of legacy stuff if you look.
Overall, 64 bit has a 20% [or better] performance increase for most workloads. There are other factors other than just size of pointers.
Size of pointers is not the major factor in cache flush since most of the cache is taken up by data items and not pointers. These data items are more or less invariant across compilation mode.
64 bit compilers only use 64 bit fetch for non-pointers if you actually request them (e.g. long long). MS is the odd ball and defines a "long" to be 32 bits even in 64 bit mode [contrary to the compilation models used by everyone else]. "int" suffices for most data. Where it doesn't, one will [have to] code "long long" and that is invariant across 32/64, except that the 32 bit code will be slower [generating 2-3 instructions for each 64 bit one].
With x86_64, the first 6 arguments to a function are passed in registers and not on the stack (i.e. no wasteful push/pops for argument passing on entry/exit).
For a function that has a lot of automatic [stack] variables, in 32 bit, any non-trivial loop could spend a lot of time dumping a register to its stack frame solely for the purpose of making room for another variable that needs the register. This is register pressure and is considerably higher in 32 bit mode.
Once an address has been loaded in a register, access relative to that base register is identical speedwise between 64 and 32 bit.
64 bit has RIP-relative addressing which allows data to be addressed as small offset from the RIP [instruction pointer/program counter] register. Since it's relative to the RIP, two consecutive instructions that address the same data location will have slightly different offsets within each instruction.
You want a study? Try a google search on "performance 32 bit vs 64 bit".
Or, the easy reader version:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...
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