Windows 7 To Be 256-Core Aware 441
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).
Hmm (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Blocking up the fail whales blowhole (Score:5, Insightful)
My browser already supports audio, video, vector graphics and a scripting language.
MS has a really bad habit of.... (Score:5, Insightful)
.... 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".
No Silverlight here. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Linux: 4096 (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a moot point. It's likely that processors will eventually have more than 256 cores, but that's going to take a long time, I'm not necessarily convinced that we will. At some point we will hit the smallest possible transister size and I'm not sure that will leave physical room for all the extra cores without moving to a much larger chip size.
That being said, if we're still using Windows 7 when mainstream computers have more than 256 cores there's something very wrong going on. Linux probably will need that kind of scalability, but it's because of the sort of rolling release schedule where releases are expected to be based upon the previous version, if loosely at times.
Re:Enough? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's remember for a moment where most installations of windows will be.
Re:Another excuse not to RTFA (Score:1, Insightful)
Actually i never had the need to install it, i think that the only SL sites that i tried to visit were MS's ones
Re:Blocking up the fail whales blowhole (Score:5, Insightful)
So why the limit?
Are they only having a byte to store the core ID?
Today it's feasible to build yourself a machine with 32 cores using 4-core AMD:s 4-core processors and a Tyan n4250QE [tyan.com.tw] with a M4985 [tyan.com.tw] daughterboard. This will give you 64 cores to play with.
In a not too far future we will see processors with a larger number of cores and therefore we will soon bang our heads into that wall. At least those of us that toy with parallelism.
Re:Another excuse not to RTFA (Score:2, Insightful)
The thing that gets me is: was this a bait and switch to get people to install siverlight to see something that sounded really interesting? When I saw the "Need to upgrade browser/install siverlight" I felt nothing but digust.
Here is an opportunity for Microsoft to demonstrate something cool and what do they do to all the folks who can never get silverlight to run on their operating systens? Yeah, tell them "Piss off! You're unclean! You can't watch our video!" That's a great way Microsoft to try convince folks to give your technology a try. Way to go Ohio.
The second thing I noticed was the sudden feeling that this was a poor imitation of Google Tech talks, in which you can watch the videos in any operating system, because google is more interested in getting the word out than trying to "sell" or "slip under the radar" some new multimedia transport mechanism.
Re:Microsoft scumbags are out early today. (Score:1, Insightful)
I first read that as "286 cores" (Score:3, Insightful)
and was impressed by how much they'd slimmed down Windows 7.
Licensing (Score:4, Insightful)
...and you'll need a license for every core.
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Blocking up the fail whales blowhole (Score:4, Insightful)
You are missing the point. You can BUY 8 cores right now for your grandma from Dell.
This means that businesses are buying 64 core machines and up for things like graphics rendering, real-time image processing, and server loads. Hell, the place I work for has a 64 core machine for handling E-mail remotely.
Within a 1-2 years, even people that WANT to run Microsoft products in a high-end environment will not be able to.
Yes, you are correct, Grandma will not have a 256 core machine on Windows 7, and will probably not face that choice. However, many things that she interacts with (her E-mail, or ebay, for instance) will not even be supported.
Re:Can't Agree (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Licensing (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Hmm (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, because people never complain about the amount of HDD Vista already takes up (do you really think 200 million (rough guess) want Active Directory Server sitting around on their HDD)? Do you think admins want to have to put in a disk to install that part? Do you think they want to wait for it to download?
Do you think Microsoft wants to charge only ~$100 for their OS on servers? Do you think home users want to pay ~$900 for their desktop OS? Do you think home users are going to be OK meeting in the middle?
This is like saying Filezilla should include FTP Server along with their FTP Client. Stupid.
Re:Linux: 4096 (Score:1, Insightful)
Says the idiot who never saw such an obvious joke?
Hand in your geek card and go browse 4chans /b/, you would fit right in there.
Re:Ripping off the User (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Silverligth required! (Score:2, Insightful)
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/ [msdn.com]
it suggests Install Silverlight !
then when coming to http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/resources/install.aspx?mode=sysreq&reason=unsupportedplatform [microsoft.com]
So those claiming that Silverlight were only needing JavaScript (Ajax) on the client-side were lying!
Kepp your shitty site!
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Linux: 4096 (Score:4, Insightful)
What I still am unclear of, is why you have to bitch and moan? If you don't want to use it, don't use it. Simple as that.
If only everyone who doesn't like Windows did that, Slashdot would be much better off.
Re:Enough? (Score:5, Insightful)
Our IT deparment must be nuts for running Windows Compute Cluster on their system [hollandhpc.com] then.
Couldn't have said it better myself.
Monolithic Operating Systems (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Blocking up the fail whales blowhole (Score:4, Insightful)
Xbox=Apple TV .5million?
Rofl... apple tv was such a threat they made xbox? I dunno what fantasy land you live in but xbox was definitely about video games not a flopping piece of garbage that sold what
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
GPGPUs (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Blocking up the fail whales blowhole (Score:4, Insightful)
You are missing the point. You can BUY 8 cores right now for your grandma from Dell. This means that businesses are buying 64 core machines and up for things like graphics rendering, real-time image processing, and server loads. Hell, the place I work for has a 64 core machine for handling E-mail remotely.
Yes but once you go past 64 it probably makes more sense to cluster several boxen rather than put all your cores in one basket. Four 64-core boxes clustered can operate at 75% while updating each box independently, where one 256-core box comes to a grinding halt for every security update.
Re:Blocking up the fail whales blowhole (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe the quote you read was referring to the xbox 360? In any case, the 360 is cool. No one gets made fun of because they have a 360. Not like when they admit they have a zune anyways.