Half of Windows 7 Machines Running 64-Bit Version 401
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by
CmdrTaco
from the way-better-than-my-one-bit-idea dept.
from the way-better-than-my-one-bit-idea dept.
nk497 writes "Microsoft has said that nearly half of machines running Windows 7 are using the 64-bit version, up from just 11% of PCs running Vista. The 32-bit version is limited to 4GB RAM, while the 64-bit version allows 192GB, as well as added security and virtualization capabilities. While Microsoft is pushing 64-bit as a way to gain performance in the OS, it earlier this year advised users to install the 32-bit version of Office 2010, 'because currently many common add-ins for Office will not function in the 64-bit edition.'"
Why, oh why? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Statistics, statistics (Score:4, Interesting)
The vast majority of Windows desktops are still running the 32-bit version of Windows XP, and that's not going to change until businesses decide they have a compelling reason to upgrade.
And my guess is that'll happen when they stop supporting XP P3 - which if my memory serves correct is 2014? Can someone back me up on that?
64 bit isn't too far off. As a developer you'd be better off getting a copy soon and work on merging your projects over to work on 64 bit now, rather than wait for crunch time.
What about flash? (Score:2, Interesting)
Although I will say this, the state of drivers for Win64 is far better then the early days (NT 3.1/3.5) of Win32.
In another news (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been running 64bit Gentoo Linux since I bought one the first models of Athlon 64, which was almost 7 years ago!
Why 64-bit is ready now (Score:4, Interesting)
One of the most obvious things about the development of 64-bit architecture is how woefully behind its 32-bit counterpart just a few years ago. I had a spare rig which I put XP 64 on in around spring of 2007. The low level of development together with the fact that powerful machines did not often have more than 4GB back then meant little incentive for devs to put time in 64-bit. I couldn't even find hardware drivers, and this led my disgruntled self to format that particular rig, whilst telling myself to research this stuff in future.
I believe Microsoft deserves some cred, along with certain hardware firms like AMD/Intel, with bringing 64 bit to the fore. Not to mention the PS3 and some Macs being of that architecture too. Ironically Microsoft's most stunted OS since the much maligned Windows ME was the first one that could run 64 bit convincingly despite a laundry list of flaws that haunted the entire life cycle of that particular product. Windows 7 is in some ways like XP was to ME a whole 9 years ago.
Whilst it's great for RAM purposes, and thus demanding things like gaming which will soon require 6GB or more for popular titles there are drawbacks. A file in 64 bit takes up more memory, mainly due to alignment padding. Thus one needs a fairly good set of chips to cache efficiently in future years as the levels of memory inevitably increase. However with the amount of progress going on I daresay all but the most budget hardware solutions will tackle drawbacks very well.
That the figure is now 50% compared to about a fifth of that not long ago is indicative that 64-bit has finally become established in the mainstream.
Re:Why, oh why? (Score:3, Interesting)
Artificial limits R US (tm) (Score:5, Interesting)
Is there a reason they can't go above the artificial limit of 192 GB?
64 bit CPUs should be able to access up to 18,446,000,000 GB of memory space, so I see no reason for the arbitrary limit.
Re:Why, oh why? (Score:5, Interesting)
PAE adds another layer to the page tables (as does 64-bit addressing), which makes TLB misses more expensive, so you don't want to enable it on systems that don't have more than 4GB of RAM. Given that very few machines ship with more than 4GB of RAM, but a 32-bit processor, it's likely that this would be a configuration that would get very little or no testing (especially from driver developers) so would be potentially very buggy.
A lot of PCI devices are 32-bit, so drivers need to use bounce buffers to do DMA transfers to physical memory over the 4GB line. This is something that device drivers designed for 32-bit systems won't do, because they can just pass 32-bit physical addresses straight to the device on the systems they were written for.
Re:What about flash? (Score:3, Interesting)
You would? What actual advantage would you get from a 64 bit version of flash over the 32 bit version? None really unless it was an absolutely massive project.
The only reason they did anything about it on Linux is because the default browser (often Firefox) was a 64 bit build.
Re:32 at work, 64 at home (Score:2, Interesting)
Other than the 16-bit apps, which 64-bit Windows 7 *finally* removed support for, I've had few issues with older programs. I even loaded Might and Magic VI (written in ~1997) and it loaded up and ran without problems -- I didn't even need to use XP compatibility mode.
Microsoft may get a lot of criticism here (much of it rightly deserved), but backwards compatibility is something they've almost always managed to get right. For the last few years I wondered how much pain we'd run into when the 'average' desktop PC finally hit the 4GB RAM barrier and had to move to a 64-bit OS, but Microsoft has managed to make it mostly painless. Of course, backwards compatibility brings bloat, but since many 64-bit users are already over the 4GB barrier, I think it's a reasonable tradeoff.
Re:Artificial limits R US (tm) (Score:5, Interesting)
18446000000 / 16GB = 1,152,875,000. Note at 400MHz(the minimum DDR3 speed) light travels about 1 meter per clock cycle. Such a memory array would be much larger than 1 cubic meter, making DDR latency numbers impossible to meet even with lightspeed interconnects.
Yes, IAAAD(I am an ASIC designer)
Upgraded? (Score:3, Interesting)
Hardware, memory limits. (Score:1, Interesting)
The size of your address bus is going to affect how much RAM your hardware supports; 64 address lines costs more on die than, say, 36-40 address lines. Likewise, storing 40-bit or 48-bit (5-6 byte) address mappings saves space over 8-byte mappings when dealing with virtual memory, paging, etc. When you have that much RAM, you're going to have to start trading off space for page size or suffer some performance issues.
In reality, modern hardware supports even larger address sizes (48-bit on AMD architectures, according to Wikipedia). But there is still some storage overhead on the OS end. One would expect Windows 8 to support something in the 128-256 TB range, etc., as hardware and memory density improve, but probably not go all the way up to 64-bit addressing.
Re:Artificial limits R US (tm) (Score:3, Interesting)
In this context, bit-width refers to the size of a data register, not the size of the address space. The address space of an x86-64 processor varies between 40-bits up to a full 64-bits, depending upon the generation of a particular architecture.
Further, consider the purpose of such a mechanism. DD3 can move data at a rate in the range of 2^34 bytes/sec. If we had a memory pool of 2^48 bytes, it would take 4 hours just to read the full contents of that memory space one time. This is clearly unusable, so that "artificial limit" is practical and efficient given current technology.
I'll never get it either (Score:4, Interesting)
That is the most common reason I hear for not using 64-bit: "My printer and/or scanner don't work with it." My response is "Then throw that piece of shit out and get a new one." However for some reason, that never seems to be an option considered. They want to keep their 10 year old scanner with their brand new $1000 desktop, even though $50 would get a better, newer scanner.
Here at work we do both. I work for a university so we have to be flexible. I push 64-bit as the default but I'll give them 32-bit if they bitch or if there is a compatibility issue.
Re:Statistics, statistics (Score:5, Interesting)
It truly amazes me how lazy developers are when it comes to supporting new things. They whine and bitch and drag their feet and blame MS, rather than just admitting they have to learn something new and doing it.
For example back in the Windows 2000 days I had a professional sound card. It had Windows NT drivers, but had some limits since NT wasn't good at sound. 98 was the preferred OS. Well when 2000 came out, the refused to release 2000 drivers. They claimed that the kernel mixer introduces 30ms of delay that you couldn't get around and that was unacceptable for pro work, etc, etc. Just use the NT drivers even though that caused some problems.
I (and probably many others) found the MSDN page on kernel streaming and sent it to them, showing them they were full of shit. Finally, many months later, they released a WDM driver... That supported only 2 of the interfaces 10 inputs and outputs. They claimed that WDM could only support one stereo set, that's it. A built in limitation by MS, nothing you can do about it. In frustration I e-mailed MS and I think they were sufficiently surprised by the stupidity of the statement that a developer actually responded and showed me where to find the docs. Turns out that WDM support lots of audio devices, either enumerated as multiple stereo pairs (as old style drivers did) or as a single multi-channel output. in fact you could do both at once.
So that went off to them and they ignored it for a long time and finally got out a real, full, WDM driver that was buggy as shit. The proceeded to work on the bugs and eventually had a nice driver. They decided they really liked WDM at that point, and quickly stopped supporting the older formats. It went from "We can't do it," to "This is the only way to do it.
But it took like a year and a half.
Many, perhaps most, developers are extremely, EXTREMELY lazy at updating to new technologies and fixing up their code. They want to keep doing shit the same way they always have, no matter how outdated that is.
Re:Statistics, statistics (Score:3, Interesting)
The latest stats that I read (which was for June) was that in terms of marketshare, Vista is at around 14.5% (down from almost 20% when Win7 was released) and right now Win7 is at around 13.5%. So if you factor in the percentage of 64-bit systems all combined, it puts 64-bit Windows platforms at roughly 8.25% give or take. These are all rough numbers, and there's varying estimates out there (some higher, some lower in terms of overall marketshare) but I think it's safe to say that 64-bit Windows systems are around 10% overall.
Windows XP usage has dropped as well since Win7 was released (by about 7%, it's now at about 62% of systems overall). So for the most part, Win7 has cannibalized both Vista and XP installations fairly equally, but the effect has been much more profound for Vista because there were far fewer systems out there running it. I would exepct that by the end of the year, Win7 will clearly surpass Vista. Long term, I'm looking for when XP drops below 50% marketshare; when that happens, I think that'll be the indicator that the transition is accelerating.