Projected 'Average' Longhorn System Is A Whopper

greg_barton writes "At first I thought this was a joke, but this article from Microsoft Watch confirms it: 'Microsoft is expected to recommend that the 'average' Longhorn PC feature a dual-core CPU running at 4 to 6GHz; a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM; up to a terabyte of storage; a 1 Gbit, built-in, Ethernet-wired port and an 802.11g wireless link; and a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today.'"

Re:The estimates are OK

[Cali Thalen]

The article and the quote both say 'dual core processor' - not dual processors. Forgive me for not knowing off the top of my head, but I am assuming that they don't mean one of those hyperthreading things though, so...multi-processor chips maybe?

Re:Really? Because all this time I thought that...

[Bryan Gividen]

As was mentioned by someone else, the quote you are referring to is total BS. Find someone who cites it to him and see if they give a when and where. And while you're wasting time doing that, check this out: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,1484,00. html

Repeat after me: HE NEVER SAID THAT

[bonch]

Did Bill Gates Really Say That? [wired.com]

Someone just did this joke a couple of articles ago. False memes that never die just make people look ignorant.

Re:Repeat after me: HE NEVER SAID THAT

[QuasiRob]

I dont believe the original poster attributed the quote to Bill Gates, so you can hardly shoot him down on that point.

Re:Absurd

[theefer]

There is no "new filesystem". WinFS is an abstraction layer on top of NTFS that will handle some directories like My Documents. It is not a full-fledged filesystem (the FS in WinFS does not stand for "filesystem" but "future storage" IIRC. Yes, this is stupid, and probably a late quickfix, as required by the company customs). And it will not be used for the whole disk, only for user files (multimedia, etc).

I just can't wait to see that ugly mess, supposedly innovative (there have been many smart filesystems before, like BeFS and soon reiser4, implemented in a much lower layer (i.e. more efficient)).

Too bad the fun is not gonna begin before 2006.

Re:The estimates are OK

[Hollinger]

It's possible. IBM has been doing it for some time with the Power4+ chip, as seen here [top500.org]. It's a form of Multi-Chip Module. You can see a picture of one here [ibm.com].

Re:The estimates are OK

[pantherace]

Yes, like the power4, and the ultrasparc IV (& another ultrasparc that's 2 US2 cores) These chips have are supposed to have 2 processor cores on a single die.

Right now, that would help AMD a heck of a whole lot more than Intel, because AMD has a MUCH more scalable arch than Intel. (AMD licenced alpha for athlons (32-bit) (dedicated northbridge connection per processor) and copied them for the Opteron (on-chip memory controller, and very fast chip interconnects)) Intel by contrast has a shared memory bandwidth for all it's chips (assume that both Opteron and Itanium have the same base memory bandwidth, for a single chip call it 6.4GB/sec, Assuming it's in the Opteron's own memory (each can have it's own memory) on a dual processor board, each Opteron would have 6.4GB/sec to it's memory, and slighly slower access to the other processor's. Itanium on the other hand shares it's memory bandwidth so each processor has 3.2GB/sec. Scale this up to 4 processors and each Opteron has 6.4GB/sec bandwidth while the Itaniums have 1.6GB/sec bandwidth. Thus why people either cluster Itaniums (with usually a max of 2 processors per node) or have very custom chipsets that emulate what the Opteron does (SGI, and an HP chipset))

Think of it as on chip SMP which is not some virtualization construct as Hyperthreading is.

Windows size?

[Nexum]

Win 3.1 Windows folder approx 40MB

Win95 approx 100MB - 150MB (4x increase)

Win 98 approx 450MB (4x increase)

Win XP approx 2.5GB (5x increase)

Longhorn? Around 12GB???

Well, seems to be the trend.

Re:Really? Because all this time I thought that...

[Grand]

That is why you run MYIE2 (www.myie2.com). It is a shell for IE that has tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, and a popup blocker. I have around 40 pages open on my crappy work computer (800 mhz, 512 mb ram) and it has no problems.

Re:Mac on the other hand...

[cuijian]

Mac OS X runs comfortably on a 600Mhz G3 laptop. Unlike other OS releases, Mac OS X has actually been getting faster with each release.

Re:Mac on the other hand...

[thunderbird46]

Haven't you ever used an Apple Pro mouse? No discernable button -- the entire shell moves :)

Re:Really? Because all this time I thought that...

[Avihson]

" And mozilla needs 4 gigs and a hyperthreading P4 to start in under 4 seconds."

Must be the windows version underlying Mozilla.

It works fine on a 4 year old gateway pII-600 laptop maxed out at 288MB. As I surf Slashdot, I am taking a break while doing compiling a report in SunOffice7, pulling from Excell and Word files on one virtual desktop. Two separate instances of Mozilla with a total of 10 tabs are open on another to confirm data. Evolution and a tabbed terminal session running ssh and wget take up another Virtual desktop, and I leave one open for KPatience. Gkrellm is showing 129 processes and 90% idle cpu. Memory is sitting at 60%.

This is normal use with Mepis, your milage may vary.

The plural of "retailer"

[JessLeah]

is "retailers". It is NOT "retailer's".

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[LuxFX]

This may be modded as funny. But even 2008 seems too early for these kind of specs. Give me a break, 2GB of RAM and 1 terabyte of disk space.

It's not that ridiculous.

On the hard drive side, 250GB drives and even 300+GB are very easy to find in any computer store. I've also heard of 1TB external hard drives. It would be pretty simple to set up a system with more than 1TB of storage.

On the RAM side, most motherboards these days support 3-4GB of RAM. Mine right now supports 4GB; I run 1GB in it for now, and will be buying a second GB fairly soon.

And on the processor side, I hear of CPUs being overclocked past 4GHz and higher all the time.

So, even though these are the specs for the "average" computer, it's possible to have it today. And bottom line, if it can be done today, then there is no reason to think it wouldn't be average in 2.5-3.0 years.

Microsoft didn't tie IE to the "kernel"

[bonch]

So, you have to wait an extra 2 seconds for it to load up because the WEB BROWSER isn't tied to the KERNEL. After all, what sort of moronic dipshits would make a web browser an integral part of a system kernel anyway?

Good question. Microsoft didn't tie IE to their kernel. They tied it to the Windows shell.

I love the progression of memes around here. IE startes out integrated into the shell, and over time becomes integrated into the actual Windows kernel itself! Cute.

Meanwhile, KDE does the same damn thing.

Re:Microsoft didn't tie IE to the "kernel"

[bonius_rex]

Actually, it's the static HTML part of IIS 6 [microsoft.com] that they put in the kernel.

Re:Windows size?

[RedWizzard]

Win 3.1 Windows folder approx 40MB
Win95 approx 100MB - 150MB (4x increase)
Win 98 approx 450MB (4x increase)
Win XP approx 2.5GB (5x increase)

Can you provide references that these are accurate average installation sizes? I'm running XP here and the Windows folder is 1.5GB, which happens to be the Microsoft suggested system requirement. And where are WinNT and 2000? XP didn't follow 98 so the alleged 5x increase between them doesn't mean anything.

According to microsoft.com (KB 304297) the requirements I've found are:
Win95: 50MB
Win98SE: 195MB
WinME: 320MB

WinNT Workstation: 110MB
Win2K Workstation: 650MB
WinXP Pro: 1.5GB

Clearly there is an upward trend but your 4-500% increase is bullshit.

Re:Tech demo at recent WinHEC

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you didn't. You most certainly did not play "10" AVIs all at the same time, "10" mp3s, and played Quake with no skipping on a Pentium 166 with 32MB of RAM. I worked on parts of the BeOS kernel, and I know it's limits under load, particularly under such a limiting environment.

You probably have never even used BeOS in your life. I like BeOS like the next guy, but don't make things up--it makes us look bad!

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[TRACK-YOUR-POSITION]

The jokes are still legit--I mean, go here: http://www.3drealms.com/games.html It's at the top of the page! They're still working on that crap! Amazing!

What amazes me most is

[Boarder2]

Slashdoters inability to read. Even in the description of the article it says that this is what Microsoft projects a common computer will be about the time Longhorn is released. These are NOT system requirements of Longhorn.

A common new computer when XP came out was about a 1.4GHz If I recall correctly, but the system requirements are 400MHz...

Just some food for thought.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[Timber_Z]

Actually where I work (Fortune 500 company) all the bean counter people have some much junk loaded onto there systems (Virus Scanners, 50 zillion company security programs, docking station programs, etc) that even a 1 ghz p3 windows 2000 computer is slow as mud.

I had to help clean the virus's off many of our VP's laptop's, and even without the virus those computers were just painfully slow.
The people with the 2+ GHz (Pentium 4's) seem to do just fine.

For myself, I just uninstalled all the company junk, and my system is fine.

Re:Tech demo at recent WinHEC

[ottffssent]

I saw that (sans Q3) on a Bebox more years ago than I can count.

As a demo, I find "we can play 6 videos at once" decidedly unimpressive.

Particularly since it's a hideously cooked demo.

Re:Every thime they announce a new operating syste

[drsmithy]

Remember when OS/2 Warp 4.0 came out?

Yes

It had fewer requirements than the 3.0 version!

No, it didn't. 4.0 required a 486, 3.0 a 386sx. 4.0 may well have run on a 386 as well (although I suspect, like NT4, it had 486-specific instructions), but it certainly didn't have lesser stated requirements than 3.0. And 4.0 certainly wouldn't have been faster than 3.0 at the bottom end of the hardware scale, because it used a lot more RAM. It might have performed better than 3,0 on higher end hardware, however.

You may be thinking of OS/2 2.0 vs 3.0, which would have had similar (if not identical) base requirements. OS/2 2.0 was a dog (2.1 was *much* faster), however, so 3.0 running as well on the same hardware would not be surprising.

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[ProgressiveCynic]

That is rather amusing! Sorry, Mr. I Know What I'm Talking About, I should definitely have refered to myself as a "Longhorn M4 Tester". I certainly didn't mean to imply that the product is farther along than it really is. As for M$ getting "beta" testers at this early stage, they happen to be one of the best companies around for getting customer feedback early and often. I had been playing with earlier builds for a while before then, but M$ gave out thousands of copies of Longhorn at their Professional Developers Conference last October, so it's actually in fairly public "beta". They don't like to refer to these early preview releases as betas, because it actually implies a much higher level of support and liability than they are ready for at this stage, but this is also the best stage to give real criticism that can still be incorporated before release.

Actually, thats not quite right....

[Rooked_One]

moore's law states the number of transistors will double... not the Mhz.

I hate to nit pick but... um... ya

Re:The fatal flaw in this reasoning

[Kris_J]

I'm out of the upgrade loop now.

You'll get sucked back in. Some app you find will benefit dramatically from a big upgrade and you'll be whacking in new CPUs and extra RAM like the old days.

For me, it was BeTwin. With BeTwin you can split one Windows PC into multiple workstations. Very sociable for small LAN parties. So all of a sudden your hardware needs to run two copies of your favourite LAN game smoothly. Fortunately I only needed to keep Diablo II running smoothly, but it was still A$500 in upgrades, including a CPU that's the maximum the motherboard can cope with.

AFAIK

[melted]

Longhorn will have several "tiers" of user experience, so it'll still work on low-end hardware and run all the apps even, but the support for Avalon/Aero will be scaled back to what the actual machine can support.

That's why these projections seem so incredibly high. And I'd say they aren't that high either. I'll be surprised as hell if 4GHz processors and faster graphic accelerators don't come out next year.

Thats for IIS, not IE.

[jon_c]

None of IE is in the kernel and that link says nothing to that effect. What is does say is that IIS has some kernel level optimizations, which is exactly the same thing tux [redhat.com] in Linux does.

I'm currently a moderator, but no-one has clarified the BS on this thread. Moderators, please moderate accordingly.

-Jon

Re:And that will be the standard computer

[JCholewa]

> You can have information go faster than the speed of light. Your electrons don't move very
> far. They just bump into the next one, which bumps into the next one. Imagine this: you've got
> a 1 light year long pole. You shoot a photon/wave of light parallel to the pole. It hits
> then end in 1 year. I push on the end of my pole. The end 1 light year away moves almost
> immediately (small lag for compression of the material). I just transferred information faster
> than you did. Electrons have a longer lag than a metal pole will, but not enough to slow it down
> past light speed.

Your post is inaccurate. When you push on one end of an object, the other end does not immediately start moving. You just produce a wave of compression from one end to the other (kind of like how tapping one end of the object only produces vibration at the other end at the speed of sound, which is certainly not infinite), and the speed of this wave depends on the rigidity of the object. For instance, if you push on one end of a rubber pole, it will take a lot longer from the other end to likewise move than if the pole were made of steel. But there is no object quite rigid enough, even in theory, that does this faster than the speed of light.

Here's a place that explains it better than I can:

http://www.vscht.cz/mat/Pavel.Pokorny/physics/FT L. html

"If you have a long rigid stick and you hit one end, wouldn't the other end have to move immediately? Would this not provide a means of FTL communication?

Well it would if there were such things as perfectly rigid bodies. In practice the effect of hitting one end of the stick propagates along it at the speed of sound in the material which depends on its elasticity and density. Relativity places an absolute limit on material rigidity so that the speed of sound in the material will not be greater than c."

--
-JC
coder
http://www.jc-news.com/parse.cgi?coding/main