Bulky System Requirements for Windows Vista 615
unsurreal writes ""A Tech Strategist within Microsoft, Nigel Page, has gone on record to discuss the hardware requirements for Windows Vista, due out next Christmas." The next year is going to be an interesting one as hardware vendors smile towards the shocking new recommended hardware needed for the next generation Windows operating system." From the article: "Graphics: Vista has changed from using the CPU to display bitmaps on the screen to using the GPU to render vectors. This means the entire display model in Vista has changed. To render the screen in the GPU requires an awful lot of memory to do optimally - 256MB is a happy medium, but you'll actually see benefit from more. Microsoft believes that you're going to see the amount of video memory being shipped on cards hurtle up when Vista ships." Coverage available at Tom's Hardware as well, with a semi-transcript at Tech Ed.
Almost admissable proof of monopoly. (Score:5, Interesting)
Blizzard could make an operating system that had lower sysreqs and decent graphics capabilities. And people would love it for saying, "Zug Zug."
Hopefully it's a nail in their home-desktop coffins that suddenly you can't put their OS on a machine that costs 600$, but somehow I doubt it. Xbox 360 for what most people currently use a home PC for, Vista for everything else.
Re:Almost admissable proof of monopoly. (Score:2, Interesting)
I think people getting ready to do some M$ bashing should look into the past and go over microsoft's releases. When they released NT, windows 95, 98, 2000, xp they always went for the median hardware configuration of the upcoming 6 to 10 years. That is part of the reason you could run windows XP on a 32MB Pentium-II (I've done it, and it chugs along just fine, enough to run a browser for surfing and playing flash games).
From the article: 2GB is the ideal configuration for 64-bit Vista, we're told. Vista
Re:Almost admissable proof of monopoly. (Score:5, Informative)
The XBox 360 has 3 very small and rather simple PowerPC cores, and the Cell uses 1 such core, and the 7(?) SPU's along with it.
Re:Almost admissable proof of monopoly. (Score:5, Insightful)
However, since 64-bit is handling data chunks that are double the size, you'll need double the memory, hence the 2GB.
64bit data is double the size of 32bit data? Just installing a 64bit version of an OS doubles your RAM requirements compared to the 32bit version?
Since when?
Re:Almost admissable proof of monopoly. (Score:3, Informative)
64bit _code_ is usually 15% larger than 32bit, and I'd expect the larger address pointers to require comparable increase in the amount of memory for data structures.
Insightful? (Score:5, Insightful)
CPU stacks now have 8-byte entries, so they are pretty much always twice as big.
AMD64 code is quite a bit bigger than IA32 code. Most estimates say 15%.
None of these double your memory requirements, but it's probably easier for them to prereq 2GB of ram than 1.4GB.
Re:Insightful? (Score:3, Informative)
Ok, I know you put "typically" in there, but it really depends on what you're doing. If you have multi-megabyte data structures (eg in a large cache to reduce db traffic) then I'd be very surprised if you had that many pointers relative to actual data. Of course, it depends on the structure of your data structures...
it's probably easier for them to prereq 2GB of ram than 1.4GB.
Possibly, but it's also easier and more purch
Re:Insightful? (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it doesn't. That's silly. Even in the most extreme case 90% of memory contains DATA.
The only way that half of memory would be pointers is if your entire computer's memory had a tree or list of integers, and what use is that? All real applications, even computational ones, contain lots of data: strings, images, documents.
The two biggest users of memory on most computers would be cache (whether the file system, or database pages, or web pages), and images (i
Re:Almost admissable proof of monopoly. (Score:5, Informative)
This is an inaccurate post in certain ways I am afraid.
You cannot meaningfully talk about a "median" hardware platform over a 6-10 year time scale. That's at least 2 upgrade cycles in duration.
When I ran XP the first time I checked to see how much RAM it was using and it was over 64MB without anything else loaded up.
That's wasn't criminal on its release date and it doesn't tally with (assuming the hyperbole of reports is accurate) Vista requiring high-end hardware on release.
I am also baffled as to how Vista's alleged requirement for powerful hardware is at all 'foresight'. Of course it'll run better on faster hardware, everything does.
Here's a prediction - Vista will not require the massive resources people are fearing to run that well. At least you'll be able to buy a reasonably-priced PC that can cope fine.
Anything else would be commercially inept.
Re:Almost admissable proof of monopoly. (Score:5, Insightful)
have you seen current 600 dollar pcs?
they far outclass the 600 dollar mac mini and those run tiger.
by the time vista ships, 600 bucks will buy you a lot more power than you "need" to run vista.
if you turn off the eye-candy , it'll run as well as xp does today.
you have it wrong, hardware requirements are not a good reason not to get vista. there are much better reasons not to get it, like the massive DRM and financially supporting ms, which is as good reason as any.
Re:Almost admissable proof of monopoly. (Score:5, Insightful)
Vista is nearly all eye-candy, if you strip off the eye-candy, all you have is XP with staggering DRM.
Re:Almost admissable proof of monopoly. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Almost admissable proof of monopoly. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Almost admissable proof of monopoly. (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of people buying in this range could get a nasty surprise if they find they have a need for a better graphics-controller.
Re:Almost admissable proof of monopoly. (Score:3, Insightful)
do you realize that the bulk of the pc's out there are P-III 866 or less? there still is a HUGE userbase of windows 98? Most people call their home pc "good enough". you do not need more than Windows 98 or 2000 on a P-III 550 with 256 meg of ram and NO 3d video card to go online, run that stolen copy of office 97 from the office, use tax-cut once a year and read email. those items cover 90% of all computer uses in the typical home.
Dont believe me? go house shopping. 9 out of 10 homes h
Re:Almost admissable proof of monopoly. (Score:5, Insightful)
We all know that the Mac Mini is pretty much the most powerful computer you can buy in a package that small, so you Mac zealots can put that tired old line to rest.
However, for some people, size really doesn't matter that much. It's pretty much a fact that you can buy a heck of a lot more computer for the money if you don't mind it being the size of a breadbox rather than the size of a standard CD drive. And then there are some people who actually do like things like extra drive bays and PCI slots.
Re:Almost admissable proof of monopoly. (Score:4, Funny)
MS Office 2003 - Bittorent - 0$
Every game you can think of - Bittorent - 0$
Total - 0$
Hell, why stop there. Get a brick and a pair sneakers and that Overdrive PC sitting in the shop window is yours. Don't forget to steal a Das Keyboard.
Artificially Growing Demand (Score:3, Interesting)
When the quality and quantity of supply stabilizes to exactly meet demand, something "terrible" happens. Manufacturers can compete on only 1 "feature": price. The price plummets, an
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And it's not true.. (Score:3, Funny)
And you are worried about being flamed for running MS software?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And it's not true.. (Score:4, Funny)
I still want to know whether you're missing functionality while running Vista on the mildly outdated hardware, btw.
Re:And it's not true.. (Score:3, Funny)
oh, wait,... are you actually going to install it?!
Re:Almost admissable proof of monopoly. (Score:5, Interesting)
It really boggles the mind sometimes. I frequent all sorts of geek news sites and gaming sites. Why is Slashdot so obsessed with the Xbox platform? I mean, ok, it's made by Microsoft, and therefore it's an automatic topic of discussion because computer geeks care a great deal more about Microsoft than Sony or Nintendo. But, let's be honest here, Microsoft's console had negligible impact on the gaming market, much less the computer geekary audience as a whole. Why do the Slashdot horde continually bring up this second tier gaming platform as if the Xbox is synonymous with console gaming? It ain't, PS2 is. And a year from now, PS3 will be.
Hopefully I won't be modded down too bad for this, but just in case, let me end on this: I do not own either a PS2 or an Xbox.
Re:Almost admissable proof of monopoly. (Score:4, Insightful)
You were doing so well right up till this point.
Nintendo has never been and still is not in any danger of going anywhere. At any given time all of their supported platforms have many spots in the top 10 selling titles on the platform-wide charts. Their largest first party titles sell nearly as many copies as the most of even the best chart-busters on the other platforms.
Nintendo can sell less cubes than Microsoft sells boxes, and Nintendo is still shoving a flaming foot of victory right up Microsoft's ass because their volume of first party sales is so high.
To illustrate the point, take Halo for example. Nearly all XBox owners bought Halo 1 and Halo 2. Very few other titles on the XBox have enjoyed that kind of success. On the Gamecube, the list of chart-busting first party titles that sold to nearly anyone seriously playing their cube isn't limited to Metroid Prime 1 and 2. There's also Zelda, Mario, Pokemon, Smash Brothers, Starfox Assault, Mario Party, Double Dash, and so on. Keep in mind these are all Nintendo branded titles.
The situation was very similar on the N64 as well. It's just a basic fact that Nintendo has always relied very heavily on it's first party titles and has profited very handsomely as a result.
Nintendo didn't just barely survive. Nintendo has been doing exceptionally well. The falling value of the Yen the past few years has hurt Nintendo much worse than sales have.
Just because the numbers don't make it out to appear as if Nintendo is doing just fine doesn't mean it isn't the case. Microsoft continues to just piss away sewers full of money on the XBox, and many believe this will continue to be the case with the 360.
In the worst case scenerio that the falling support for the Cube will carry over into the Revolution, that doesn't change the fact that Nintendo still owns the handheld market.
Despite Sony's claims to the contrary, the GBA still dominates, and the DS is fat and happy with stellar sales. (Though I honestly wish I understood how Nintendogs has become so popular....)
There's also one other thing to remember.
Practically every Gamecube player is still waiting for Twilight Princess, delayed though it may be.
If the Xbox is lucky, it MIGHT see one last huge seller before the 360 replaces it. Don't count on it, though.
(BTW - DC, PS2, XBox, GC, GBA, DS, PSP... Yes, I got'em all...)
256mb? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:256mb? (Score:3, Interesting)
One reason why - how is game performance going to be affected by the O/S requiring 256M of the GPU memory? How much does it release when you launch D3? How much *more* vid ram would you have by running linux?
Maybe it's a step for linux to be "the" viable gaming product. If you're seeing a 30fps increase just because you're using a different O/S, I think a lot of gamers will take a second look (of course it's the chicken and egg problem still)
Re:256mb? (Score:3)
For me and you, probably, the reasons to use GNU/Linux are the same than {ten,five,three,n}-years ago.
For the [wo]man out there that knows just that "they has Internet, which is that blue icon right on the screen", it is Yet Another Reason to continue using XP/win98.
If everybody loved Free OSes we would probably live in a better world. If everybody was able to get along quietly with their neighbour without starting wars every few days, we would live in a better world.
Unfortunately neither will happen, du
Hey, let's all take turns bashing Microsoft! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hey, let's all take turns bashing Microsoft! (Score:2)
Re:Hey, let's all take turns bashing Microsoft! (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Heard this before (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Heard this before (Score:2)
Maybe I'm missing something, but who exactly is it that is slobbering over variable transparancy windows, and flipping backside notation stuff?
Re:Heard this before (Score:2, Funny)
I recall the first install of Win 95, the packaging said Minimum 8 MB RAM. Yes, if you don't mind paging on those slow old MFM/RLL 20/30 MB drives over your pokey ISA bus. 12 MB was manageable, with patience. 16 MB was tolerable. 24 MB and up was comfortable. This on a 33 MHz 486.
When I bought my first Pentium with 64 MB and Win 98 it was apparent almost from day 1 that 64 MB was j
Re:Heard this before (Score:5, Interesting)
They want the Aero rendering to be considered fast and snappy. And, oh, it will possibly be so, but only on the right hardware. If they put the official requirements too low, it would just be said that the new interface is so full of eyecandy that it can't perform.
What's really interesting here is what they manage to pull of on laptops, together with ATI and Nvidia. Will the power management for graphics chips make sense, even when 3D mode doesn't equal "battery sucking gaming mode"? The (public) slides from Microsoft even from the very first mentioning of Longhorn's 3D UI stressed this aspect. It will be interesting to see the solution. If a Mactel box will provide a sleek UI with a charge keeping the machine powered for twice as long, that'll be a very real selling point.
Re:Heard this before (Score:4, Informative)
Windows XP: 128MB RAM, 300MHz [microsoft.com]
Windows 2000: 64MB RAM, 133MHz [microsoft.com]
Windows 98: 16MB, 66 MHz [microsoft.com]
Windows 95: 4MB RAM, 386 or higher [microsoft.com]
I looked for some older requirements, but it's a good start, and shows approximately the equivalent of solid state advances etc. Yes, they beef it up, but fairly on par with new tech.
Buy NVIDIA and ATI stock (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Buy NVIDIA and ATI stock (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Buy NVIDIA and ATI stock (Score:2)
Re:Buy NVIDIA and ATI stock (Score:3, Funny)
Me: "Stock tips on
seriously (Score:5, Funny)
B: "It came with my purchase of Windows Vista."
It's kinda like those people that drive with huge-ass spoilers on their tiny cars. Did the car come with the spoiler or did the spoiler come with the car?
Re:seriously (Score:2)
It would be one thing if MS figured it would be able to stick to these specs for a while (ie several years). But something tells me they ain't thinking like that
256MB of video memory? (Score:5, Insightful)
Eye-candy doesn't result in functionality Microsoft... shift your attention towards usability.
Re:256MB of video memory? (Score:2)
Re:256MB of video memory? (Score:3, Informative)
A lot of the lower end machines still ship with 32 Megs on the card, and run fine (provided you've got a decent amount of system memory). Obviously that's too low for serious gaming, but the OS has no troubles with that amount of memory on the GPU.
Having 256 on the GPU would be on the extreme high-end (only the highest end powermac ships by default with a card that big), not "a happy medium" for OS X.
Re:256MB of video memory? (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.apple.com/macosx/upgrade/requirements.h tml [apple.com]
Which does raise the question as to what the hell Microsoft are doing that means they require the same amount of graphics RAM as MacOS X needs for the system!
Re:256MB of video memory? (Score:3, Informative)
To be fair, Microsoft doesn't require a 256MB video card for Windows Vista. The requirement will probably be similar to Mac OS X: a video card that can display the resolution you want, at the colour depth you want. That's it.
The 256MB figure is for the new eye candy, and not just that, it's for the new eye candy to run at full speed and not start chugg
Re:256MB of video memory? (Score:5, Insightful)
Right now, the bulk of windows purchasers are the same people who don't know any better and are more impressed with flashy graphics for their home PC than features that 99% of them will never use or never realize they are using.
Windows is the OS of the masses, yes it can be a good OS and in some respects it is, however... the bottom line is that Windows is being designed to appeal to people who buy the system based on what they *see*.
Re:256MB of video memory? (Score:3, Interesting)
If the O/S uses 256 MB of graphic RAM how much of that will get released by the O/S when I want to run a really high resolution game?
HL 2 looked fairly good on 128 MB (what I have now). I wonder if they are purposely bloating the req speculatively or if this is the ideal just to run the O/S. *shudder*
Oh and who wants to bet on the number of companies that will buy these insane-o high powered systems to run Vista because XP won't be supported at that point
Re:256MB of video memory? (Score:3, Funny)
As long as I can take a rocket-launcher to him at 30fps it's all good . . . . .
Thank you Captain Obvious... (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, these seem to be optimal, not minimum requirements, and from the article "minimum system requirements for Windows Vista will not be known until summer 2006 at the earliest." So, I'm going to go out on a limb and speculate that your average system today will work fine with Vista, but you won't have all the bells and whistles.
Finally, the '512 MByte is "heaps" for a 32-bit system. For a 64-bit system, however, "you're going to want 2 gigs of DDR3 RAM."' is off. If you are happy with 512, you'll be happy with 1GB. If you play lots of games, you most likely have 1GB now and you'll be happy with 2gb. And if you play EverQuest 2, you'll be happy with about 20gb, but it will still skip in places and you can't use the ultra-high resolution.
Re:Thank you Captain Obvious... (Score:2)
The article actually says that it's due out next Christmas, though I was also under the impression that it was 2006/7.
Even then, the specifications are obscene. If I can render a GUI with a 800MHz CPU and 128MB RAM total, then how the Hell do they claim a need for 256MB solely for graphics? And a recommended 2GB in general. That's obscene.
Time to play up Linux's potential for running on low-power systems.
Re:Thank you Captain Obvious... (Score:2)
Re:Thank you Captain Obvious... (Score:3, Insightful)
through emulation at least.
you cannot emulate the DRM of the x86 mac or the "EULA" of the ppc macs but you can install the basic vista on a ppc machine. the DRM (secure boot) isn't mandatory or you'd have several billion computers that vista couldn't be installed on.
that's what i mean by artificial restrictions. you can buy mac os or windows and install on any chip arch/hardware if the manufacturers don't go out of their way to prevent it. DRM and the like are artificial restrictions.
Thanks, Bill! (Score:5, Insightful)
Ooops! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Ooops! (Score:2)
Perfect time to bust out that laptop! (Score:5, Funny)
No reason to deviate... (Score:4, Interesting)
But the capital expenses associated with this "upgrade" is needless and ridiculous even if we weren't planning to migrate to Linux.
I can see three things happening (Score:4, Interesting)
1)GNU/Linux goes mainstream faster
2)Macs go mainstream
3)Both 1+2
MS driving up HW prices? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know about you, but I really don't like this system of forced upgrades due to "enhancements." If I buy a computer that is 1000$, I expect it to be good for quite a long time. I think computers are at a point now where they can be treated as appliances, lasting for decades. If people just kept on using windows 2000/xp, a current day $500 PC would be good enough until the hardware dies. The problem is, that hardware just doesn't last that long these days. Ah well, maybe it's not a giant conspiracy, but I can see why Dell and such like their partnership with MS.
Well, maybe there are enough people like me who are fed up with upgrades, and they'll just stay with windows 2000/xp or use linux/*bsd.
Ho-hum (Score:5, Insightful)
We're covering this as if most users were going to upgrade from XP to Vista, and will be thus compelled to shell out big bucks for new graphics cards, ram, disks, etc for their current computers just to run the new OS.
This is, of course, not the case. Most users who cannot upgrade will march blithely on with the OS they already have. I'm writing from work, where we're still using Windows 2000. The computer next to me is an ancient Pentium 133--and it runs Win95.
Home users will encounter Vista when they decide to buy a brand new computer, and from that perspective, they'll have gotten a shiny new OS with their shiny new hardware. Nobody will see the cost of the OS and the cost of the hardware to run it as separate things.
Re:Ho-hum (Score:2)
I have no desire to get Vista. Why would I? What will it have that XP can not do already for me? Espcially if I'm gonna have to build a new comp altogether. No, I just can't justify that kinda money cause it's new.
Released Next Christmas......Right (Score:5, Interesting)
MS will never play fair, why should they start now (even though they are required to by law).
Hahaha! (Score:5, Interesting)
Businesses already have almost -no- incentive to switch to Vista. Now, instead of just buying expensive licences, they have to upgrade the graphics cards on their vanilla work PCs??
Has someone at MS gone patently nuts?
Yes, I know you will say "Microsoft will pull support for XP, and thus force everyone to upgrade." Maybe. But I think there will be backlash here.
And if you think that Vista is going to be exclusively for consumers, please tell me how Dell will provide $400 dollar machines with such beefy video cards!! It defies logic!
This is madness! Madness I say!
Re:Hahaha! (Score:2)
Re:Hahaha! (Score:3, Informative)
Most large companies are on 3-year PC refresh cycles already anyway. 3 years is a reasonable time to depreciate them off their books, and it's exactly how long Dell's extended warranty lasts on them.
When you want "a new PC" for an employee at any sufficiently large company, you place a request for the standard model. That standard model is "whatever Dell is selling this month, bundled with a license for whatever OS Microsoft is selling this year."
In our case, it just moved
Token mac comment (Score:2)
Just another good reason... (Score:2)
What will it take to get me to Vista?
The Killer App that I need to run, and can't be run on anything else.
And what is that Killer App?
Haven't got a clue. Can't even imagine what more I'll want to do on a computer that I can't already do now.
Good luck, Microsoft.
Re:Just another good reason... (Score:2)
640K ought to be enough for anybody. -- Bill Gates, 1981
Just for some perspective.
Now I'll get off your lawn.
Gigantic Leap (Score:3, Informative)
Windows Vista: 2 Gigabytes of RAM recommended
WTF??
vectorized icons need 256MB? (Score:5, Insightful)
(and the Indy *did* ship with a journaling filesystem... XFS...)
Ya, so? (Score:3, Interesting)
256mb of vram should be enough for anyone.
Talk to me in 10 years and tell me then if you think that thats stupid.
A few things (Score:5, Interesting)
As of the beta 1, the unoptimized version works kick ass on an 1800XP, 512MB DDR & Radeon 9700. Unless you want to use crap like "Aero Glass" you won't need a high end vid card. Personally speaking, I'm still worried about the DRM monitor requirements and I am also a bit uninterested since so many features (i.e. anything I really cared about as a windork) were dropped from the upcoming release.
There couldn't be a larger piece of disinformation circulating the net right now.
RAM Price (Score:2)
The article claims that because Vista will require 1-2GB of RAM, it will drive the memory prices up. I don't think that was the case in the past and as far as I remember memory prices came down steadily after windows-XP was released. I doubt that WindowsVista will
Windows 2000 forever! (Score:5, Interesting)
There just isn't enough new in Longhorn/Vista to justify the buy. Where's the return on investment here? Why buy a new computer for everybody in your call center? Hello?
There's nothing wrong with rendering the entire user interface in the GPU. Softimage was doing that under NT 4 in 1997, using OpenGL. It was clunky back then, but it's worked fine for years. Multiple windows tend to run slowly in OpenGL on Windows, but that's because of a common bug that allows only one window to update per refresh. Buffer swapping needs to be better worked out for the multiple window case. But all of this requires relatively minor improvements.
HDCP the new enemy (Score:5, Interesting)
Now slashdotters, it is our mission to raise the awareness on these HDCP monitors. They are the new Palladium, the new NGSCB, the new (circuit city) divx.
I am feeling the red mist of rage!
Macintosh will be the viable "store bought" rig to recommend friends and relatives purchase. And for use, we will need to get Linux working with HD-DVD and Blu-ray in short order!
Airtight seal (Score:3, Informative)
Nice, clean ANALOG RGB signals MUST be presented to the CRT cathodes before the tube can present an image. And there are beautiful horizontal and vertical sync signals available at the deflection yoke.
And if you break the airtight seal, the monitor won't do an HDCP handshake anymore.
A Fist Full of Errors! (Score:5, Interesting)
Hurl chunks is more like it when I see the bill.
However, since 64-bit is handling data chunks that are double the size, you'll need double the memory, hence the 2GB.
You've got to be kidding with this statement. Does this person even understand the difference between 32-bit and 64-bit processors? I don't think so.
NCQ allows for out of order completions - that is, if Vista needs tasks 1,2,3,4 and 5 done, it can do them in the order 2,5,3,4,1
Excuse me, but Vista isn't the one doing the reordering of hard drive accesses. NCQ is done in the controller and drive itself.
NCQ is supported on SATA2 drives
And selected SATA-1 drives.
AGP is 'not optimal' for Vista. Because of the fact that graphics cards may have to utilise main system memory for some rendering tasks, a fast, bi-direction bus is needed - that's PCI express.
Will there be an AGP system left that can meet the rest of the Vista requirements? And I thought AGP had an option to use system memory in the specification as well.
no current TFT monitor out there is going to support high definition playback in Vista.
What if they release Vista, and nobody bought? If the consumers finally said We've had enough of this sh|t?
This isn't really Microsoft's fault - HDCP is something that content makers, in their eternal wisdom, have decided is necessary to stop us all watching pirated movies.
Oh yes it is Microsoft's fault. Without Microsoft enabling this the whole concept would be DOA. And Trusted Computing isn't even mentioned.
Tell me again, please. What is the compelling reason to upgrade to Vista?
Re:A Fist Full of Errors! (Score:5, Informative)
As if people have a choice. If you go to a computer store in 2007, every computer will have Vista preinstalled. (Except the Macs.)
What is the compelling reason to upgrade to Vista?
It doesn't matter, since most Windows sales come from new machines.
Re:A Fist Full of Errors! (Score:3, Informative)
A 32-bit integer takes up the same amount of memory in a 64-bit system as in a 32-bit system. Just because your processor width has doubled does not mean you've automatically upsized all your variables. ASCII characters do not suddenly require 16-bits each, nor has Unicode ballooned to 32-bits/character. In short, the data in the database continues to occupy the same amount of bits as before -- not double.
Not quite. (Score:3, Informative)
So really, its just pointers doubling in size that should effect your memory usage. This will not do anythi
SATA NCQ does *NOT* give SCSI performance (Score:5, Informative)
This is not to say it's not a hell of a lot more useful than not being able to do disconnected writes at all, but pre-insertion of write barriers instead of post insertion via scheduling is really a poor-man's version of I/O concurrency.
Unless you go out of your way to do a FUA (Force Unit Access), on SATA, there is no guarantee that write data has been committed to stable storage, rather than just cache.
In SCSI tagged command queueing, you can be guaranteed that the write has been committed to stable storage before the write is acknowledges as completed (yes, it's optional to turn this off in mode page 2, but only idiots do it).
The upshot of this is that the OS must issue FUA on writes and stall the pipeline for other writes that don't require a commitment to stable storage (e.g. FUA for metadata and journalling, no-FUA for other data).
This is (effectively) the difference between DOW (Delayed Ordered Writes) and SU (Soft Updates), which is what makes SU so much more effective than DOW.
Further, it means that the OS can't use the acknowledgement to schedule future operations on the disk, without knowing ahead of time the FUA is necessary for a given write.
The issue here is that if I'm, for example, updating the contents in a single directory entry block on disk in two different processes, instead of deciding to delay the second update until I know the first one has completed (via the acknowledgement), I must issue the first one as an FUA command, and then the second one as an FUA command, which adds latency to my pipeline.
"Mr. SATA, I've worked with Mr. SCSI, and you're no Mr. SCSI".
-- Terry
Actually, this will probably be good for Microsoft (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, most Slashdotters would read that and say:
"bloated software."
The average non-techie computer user will think:
"wow!"
When seeing these silly requirements for Vista (oh, what a stupid stupid stupid name!), most Slashdotters are thinking:
"Incompetent idiots."
The average non-techie computer user will think:
"wow!"
Why so much VRAM for GPU-driven display? (Score:5, Insightful)
Mac OS X 10.4 is capable of rendering the entire interface using the GPU (they call it Quartz Extreme [apple.com]). The system delivers some incredibly cool visual effects (see Core Image [apple.com]), and it does it on systems with as little as 64 MB of VRAM on the graphics card. So what the hell is Vista going to do where 256 will be optimal?
OEM Windows (Score:3, Insightful)
Fsck Hollywood (Score:3, Insightful)
HD-DVD and BluRay can join DAT, SACD, and DVD-Audio as formats that were killed by greed.
Perhaps I'm missing something (Score:3, Interesting)
Does this make sense to anyone? It sounds like he thinks the memory footprint of all applications will double just because the address size has. Or perhaps this is just what they're going to tell users when the next version of MS Word occupies 200 megs of RAM.
The Vista Cruiser... (Score:3, Informative)
The real reason... (Score:5, Funny)
We Told You So (Score:3, Insightful)
You want to stay with Microsoft?
You pay the hardware cost.
I can't wait until the corporations see that every secretary in the office has to have 2GB of RAM - or they have to support 2000 and XP themselves after "end of life" - which will be about five minutes after Vista ships, since Gates may be an asshole, but he's not stupid.
I can't wait to see the minimum disk space, too. Forget about putting Vista on a Bart's PE flash drive...even if you have a 4GB one.
wank (Score:3, Insightful)
Funny how MacOS X has managed just fine on a 32meg card for the past couple of years... even Tiger.
Microsoft is trying to tell us that rendering a Windows desktop requires more 3d memory capacity than the PS2 uses for something like Gran Turismo 4? That their own X box has 1/4 the capacity needed to render a Windows desktop?
Pfft..
smash.
Re:Third party replacement (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, great, let me know when you're done.
Re:Third party replacement (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Third party replacement (Score:3, Informative)
Windows 95(mostly) and NT were written from scratch. To a point so was 2000 (based off of NT). But XP was not written from scratch, it was an upgrade from 2000. Vista is not based on XP, it was a total rewrite. Why else would it be ta
Re:huh? (Score:2)
Every pointer now takes twice the space.
That is one of the nice things about the PPC and Sparc. If you do not need 64bit pointer you can just compile for 32bit. You can run 32 bit code on a 64 64bit AMD/Intel CPU but you get a big performance boost if you recompile to 64 bit since you have a more registers available in 64bit mode.
Re:My computer only has 256 RM :( ... (Score:2)
As a sidenote, SuSE9.3 war the last SuSE for me, although I was using it since old SuSE4.x days. For my own part, I welcome my new Debian overlords.
Re:Mac guys, this is your cue! (Score:3, Insightful)
But why such a powerful GPU? If Apple can achieve the same thing using a minimum of 32MB (like my little iBook), why can't Microsoft?
What's the compelling reason for such a hefty GPU requirement? Do you have to launch Doom III to 'delete' files? This is serious GPU power here, and if it's just rendering windows it seems to be poorly optimis