Linked by Jordan Spencer Cunningham on Wed 7th Oct 2009 19:15 UTC, submitted by JayDee
Microsoft has been thinking about Windows 8 for a while now even through the production of Windows 7. Some information has been gathered by our friends over at Ars, and all of this said information points to possible 128-bit versions of Windows 8 and definite 128-bit versions of Windows 9. Update: Other technophiles better-versed than I in this whole 64/128-bit business pointed out that it must be for the filesystem (such as ZFS described in this article) rather than the processor and memory scheme.
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RE: Not the File System...
by showcaser on Wed 7th Oct 2009 22:37
in reply to "Not the File System..."
Member since:2009-06-17
I also think the main motivation behind 128-bit support is probably not the file system or addressing more memory but for native support of 128-bit floating point numbers.
Even today, there are a number of number crunching applications which could gain some reasonable computational efficiency by using processors with native 128-bit support. Processing of things like GUIDs and 128-bit encryption keys may also see benefit, no?
From my own experience, I've encountered scenarios where the rounding errors as a result of operations with 64-bit floating point numbers were too excessive and I had to use 128-bit values.
Hasn't there already been specialized (supercomputers) built around 128-bit processors?
RE[2]: Not the File System...
by twitterfire on Thu 8th Oct 2009 14:33
in reply to "RE: Not the File System..."
Member since:2008-09-11
Member since:
2006-01-25
This isn't about the file system. The Ars article gives a direct quote from a Senior R&D guy at MS... I highly doubt he would say IA-128 when he was talking about file system addressing.
I suspect this is probably an effort to prepare for 128-bit FPU. It is highly unlikely that AMD or Intel would extend the address space anytime soon, but that does not mean they wouldn't extend the size of FP registers.
Having full 128-bit FPU would be useful for a variety of things, and could pave the way to eventually unifying SSE with x86.
Read this: http://forums.amd.com/devblog/blogpost.cfm?catid=208&threadid=11293...
All completely speculative of course, just saying the file system explanation doesn't seem to fit very well to me.