Next version of Windows to be 'fundamentally different'
CORONADO, Calif.--Future versions of Windows will have to be "fundamentally different" in order to take advantage of multicore processors, according to Ty Carlson of Microsoft.
"You're going to see in excess of 8, 16, 64 and beyond processors on your client computer," said Carlson, director of technical strategy at Microsoft, during a panel discussion at the Future in Review conference. Windows Vista, on the other hand, is "designed to run on 1, 2, maybe 4 processors," he said, referring to the fact that quad-core processors are now available from Intel and are on the way from Advanced Micro Devices.
The problem, as has been noted on many occasions, is that loads of PC applications were programmed with serial processing in mind, meaning that the performance of those applications increased as a chip's clock speed increased. That's not how it works anymore. The chip industy has decided that multiple cores are the best way to keep increasing performance, and that means applications now have to be designed with parallel processing in mind.
Intel and AMD have not confirmed processor plans beyond eight cores, and only in theory at that. Intel has demonstrated an 80-core processor, but that's just a research project that can't run conventional code. But Carlson appears convinced that he and other software developers should start getting ready for that world.
"In 10 to 15 years' time we're going to have incredible computing power. The challenge will be bringing that ecosystem up that knows how to write programs," Carlson said. Windows Vista is designed to take advantage of multiple processing threads, but not 16 threads. And application developers are even further behind in making the transition to the multicore world.
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom.
Given how long it took MS to bring Vista to the market how long will it be before it's "fundamentally different" replacement appears. It looks like Apple will be extending its technological lead...
XP scales well to 2 or 4 CPUs for some tasks. If you ran XP on a machine with 64 CPUs (if the artificial limitations were removed, which are there precisely to prevent this type of complain) it wouldn't run much faster than on a 2 CPU machine. And rest assured that the same thing happens to Leopard.
The "next Windows" will be apparently fundamentally different in the sense that the traditional linear programming (used both in Leopard and in Vista) is being deprecated.
Apple no longer makes PC hardware.
Apple no longer writes an OS.
They are putting a shell on top of BSD.
That's innovation for you.
True technical leadership.
Microsoft is not trying "to play catch up" but they are simply trying to find new ways of using the same hardware.
longer than anticipated and ship without most of the new features
anyway.
kernels for MS to read through and get their "innovations" from
;)
/P
write an OS that is designed to run on them. Also, that is not the
question posed here. This is a question of Serial code support
verses Parallel code support and why Parallel code support is not
yet included in an OS.
source, MS steals from Apple, everybody on the planet steals from
MS. Things are as the should be.
IBM ported Linux to its Power platform that can use hundreds of CPUs, and released that code to the Linux community. IBM runs Linux on mainframes, minicomputers, and workstations that it designs and sells.
present, they are too focused on proprietary, locked in, software
that does not generally support open standards. microsoft will
have to make a profound change in its business strategy.
Faced with a level playing field, or a market that it doesn't monopolize, MS cannot compete. So it tries to extend its Windows monopoly into new fields. That's an understandable thing to do. It's just incredible that they can't or won't fix the problems of their OSes before starting new versions.
All bugs fixed are available as hotfixes if you had reason to need them.
Linux however works GREAT with 64 bit and multi-threading. Heck, my Pentium 4 2.8 w/ HT runs Linux well, and it takes advantage of the multi-threading capabilities of the "Hyper Threading" (yea I know I'm 3 years behind, I can't afford an upgrade).
What Microsoft needs to do is what Mac did. Scrap their DOS and NT based OS setup and start from scratch. With hardware emulation, they could still maintain backward compatibility with older Windows OSes, and fix most of their problems. They need a fresh start.
Compound TCP
The existing algorithms that prevent a sending TCP peer from overwhelming the
network are known as slow start and congestion avoidance. These algorithms
increase the amount of segments that the sender can send, known as the send
window, when initially sending data on the connection and when recovering from
a lost segment. Slow start increases the send window by one full TCP segment
for either each acknowledgement segment received (for TCP in Windows XP and
Windows Server 2003) or for each segment acknowledged (for TCP in Windows
Vista and Windows Server "Longhorn"). Congestion avoidance increases the send
window by one full TCP segment for each full window of data that is
acknowledged.
These algorithms work well for LAN media speeds and smaller TCP window sizes.
However, when you have a TCP connection with a large receive window size and a
large bandwidth-delay product (high bandwidth and high delay), such as
replicating data between two servers located across a high-speed WAN link with
a 100 ms round trip time, these algorithms do not increase the send window
fast enough to fully utilize the bandwidth of the connection. For example, on
a 1 Gigabit per second (Gbps) WAN link with a 100 ms round trip time (RTT), it
can take up to an hour for the send window to initially increase to the large
window size being advertised by the receiver and to recover when there are
lost segments.
To better utilize the bandwidth of TCP connections in these situations, the
Next Generation TCP/IP stack includes Compound TCP (CTCP). CTCP more
aggressively increases the send window for connections with large receive
window sizes and large bandwidth-delay products. CTCP attempts to maximize
throughput on these types of connections by monitoring delay variations and
losses. CTCP also ensures that its behavior does not negatively impact other
TCP connections.
In testing performed internally at Microsoft, large file backup times were
reduced by almost half for a 1 Gbps connection with a 50ms RTT. Connections
with a larger bandwidth delay product can have even better performance. CTCP
and Receive Window Auto-Tuning work together for increased link utilization
and can result in substantial performance gains for large bandwidth-delay
product connections.
CTCP is enabled by default in computers running beta versions of Windows
Server ?Longhorn? and disabled by default in computers running Windows Vista.
You can enable CTCP with the netsh interface tcp set global
congestionprovider=ctcp command. You can disable CTCP with the netsh interface
tcp set global congestionprovider=none command.
When a TCP segment is lost, TCP assumes that the segment was lost due to
congestion at a router and performs congestion control, which dramatically
lowers the TCP sender?s transmission rate. With Explicit Congestion
Notification (ECN) support on both TCP peers and in the routing
infrastructure, routers experiencing congestion mark the packets as they
forward them. TCP peers receiving marked packets lower their transmission rate
to ease congestion and prevent segment losses. Detecting congestion before
packet losses are incurred increases the overall throughput between TCP peers.
Windows Vista supports ECN but it is disabled by default. You can enable ECN
support with the netsh interface tcp set global ecncapability=enabled command.
Yeah, I have already turned off IPV6, compression, antivirus/firewall, etc. My next step is to check HP support site for any updates, but geesh, this is something a new buyer should not have to do in the first place. I am way more technical than Joe User. Joe User would be completely lost trying to deal with this. Either Microsoft did not do a good job testing this, HP did not do a good job implementing/testing, or both.
If you have a PC with multiple physical CPUs - that is, two or more chips installed on the motherboard - you'll need Windows Vista Business, Enterprise, or Ultimate to take advantage of both CPUs. If you install Vista Home Basic or Home Premium, the OS will only recognize one CPU. That's similar to the way Windows XP works today - if have a dual-CPU machine, you need to install XP Professional to use both CPUs.
So what about dual-core CPUs? That's different. All Vista versions, even the lowly Home Basic, support multiple cores on a single chip, with no additional configuration required.
system that facilitates software running on multiple processors and
multiple cores? It would probably issue, no problem!
been hearing that since windows 2.0 haven't seen a big change
yet.........
how many features will the next one have removed before it is
on shelves?
you know, MS always talks about how big a challenge the next
OS is, they drive expectations down, and then meet them.
funny the other 2 major OSes seem to have no trouble getting
things done.
DRM.
of the OS like Vista.
If you want to see how bad DRM is in Vista, just read this...
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
- Maybe 4?
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by diabulos
May 27, 2007 10:26 PM PDT
- He said; "Windows Vista, on the other hand, is "designed to run on 1, 2, maybe 4 processors,"
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Reply to this comment
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(64 Comments)what does he mean by 'maybe 4'? does that mean that Vista is sort of iffy running quads?