Microsoft Plans 128bit Windows 8 & Cancels Works Comments

I knew Linkedin would come in handy one day! How many of TR are on there?

128 bits?! I assume this is for registers and not memory addressing? 64 bits already allows addressing of 16 exabytes, which is equivalent to more than 8 million 2TB hard disks.

To quote Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/128-bit

"128-bit processors could become prevalent when 16 exbibytes of addressable memory is no longer enough (128-bit processors would allow memory addressing for 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 bytes (~340.3 undecillion bytes or 281,474,976,710,656 yobibytes ). However, physical limits make such large amounts of memory currently impossible, given that amount greatly exceeds the total data stored on Earth."

Paul Thurrott says:

"Wow. I have to admit, the most amazing thing about this rumor is that anyone believed it. I won't single anyone out, but spare me. It's completely and utterly bogus. Obviously."

There we have it.

yeah - who would ever need more than 640K RAM?!!?!

;^)

Seriously though - does seem to be a bit of a gimmick - but hey future proofing can never be bad

_OR_ 128-bit data buses would allow the shuttling around of twice as much 64-bit data at once, thereby further increasing parallelism in computing. Not only would we have mutliple cores, but the ability to shuttle more than one data stream at once.

*waits patiently for windows 8 RC*

I dont think general consumers will catch up with the speed technology improves, let along spending xtra money on new machines...

64bit versions of Windows have been around for years, so there may well be a gradual transition from the OS supporting 128bit to hardware that normal consumers use supporting 128bit. Though I guess you'd probably phase out 32bit in favour of 64bit which is much more prevalent now than a few years ago.

@Technology changes, and so should you; Nice name - shame about your extremely simplified way of looking at technology. A little bit of knowledge NEQ expert.

Hey why don`t we just jump straight to 65536-bit addressing! :) Because, bigger does not necessarily = better. Also seeing as how many `data streams` are 1-bit serial in nature then we already have "the ability to shuttle more than one data stream at once".

@Technology changes...: the 32-bit Pentium had a 64-bit bus, the nVidia GTX 285 has a 512-bit memory bus. You cannot infer the integer or address register size of a processor from the width of a bus that it may be connected to.

Graphics cards have 128/256/512bit bus widths. Plus x86 processors have 128bit (upcoming 256bit) FPU units. It's not far fetched for an OS and CPU to go 128bit. It would just be for performance purposes and not because of a register space limit. 128bit wide execution would greatly improve the performance of 128bit encryption/decryption and IPv6... the former is very common.

@Gordon: what's the first screen shot supposed to be showing? It's also entirely possible that Robert Morgan was simply exaggerating a bit on his work experience. He wouldn't be the first.

I'm curious - is anyone aware of even the rumor of a 128-bit CPU (for a home PC)?
Or is microsoft just wanting to look cool so they can say "hey, yeah, we had the software before even Intel was ready" or whatever?

Oh, and as for MS Works, all i can say is thank god! Now there was the kid who hung around the crowd but everyone tried to lose....

"You cannot infer the integer or address register size of a processor from the width of a bus that it may be connected to."

I think that goes for most things in life too.