Windows Vista - supercomputers only please

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Nigel Page, some Microsoft guy has announced what you’ll need to run Windows Vista -

System breakdown

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.

CPU: Threading is the main target for Vista. Currently, very little of Windows XP is threaded - the target is to make Vista perform far better on dual-core and multi-core processors.

RAM: 2GB is the ideal configuration for 64-bit Vista, we’re told. Vista 32-bit will work ideally at 1GB, and minimum 512. However, since 64-bit is handling data chunks that are double the size, you’ll need double the memory, hence the 2GB. Nigel mentions DDR3 - which is a little odd, since the roadmap for DDR3, on Intel gear at least, doesn’t really kick in until 2007.

HDD: SATA is definitely the way forward for Vista, due, Microsoft tells us, to Native Command Queueing. 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 if that’s a more efficient route for the hard drive head to take over the disk. This leads to far faster completion times. NCQ is supported on SATA2 drives, so expect them to start becoming the standard sooner rather than later. Microsoft thinks that these features will provide SCSI-level performance.

Bus: 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.

Display: Prepare to feel the red mist of rage - no current TFT monitor out there is going to support high definition playback in Vista. You may already have heard rumblings about this, but here it is. To play HD-DVD or Blu-Ray content you need a HDCP compatible monitor. Why? Because these formats use HDCP to encrypt a video signal as it travels along a digital connection to an output device, to prevent people copying it. If you have just standard DVI or even an analogue output, you’re going to see HD scaled down to a far-less-than-HD resolution for viewing - which sucks. 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.

http://www.apcstart.com/teched/pivot/entry.php?id=6

I don’t know of anyone except hardcore gamers who have anywhere near that spec! What the hell are Microsoft thinking?

I think I’ll stick with XP until they stop making patches for it.

2

There’s just no way I’m going to upgrade to a new OS and new hardware if it requires junking my perfectly good display for one with fewer features.

3

I remember, at my last job, we joked about some of the new computers we were installing. They had until a year earlier been export restricted as supercomputers.

They were Macs intended for the secretaries’ desktops.

4

I agree with Anne Neville. While certainly pursuing a questionable route, MS aren’t expecting ludicrous things from the hardware market. The vast majority of installations of Windows are new, upgrades are a tiny part of the market.

Leaving aside some highly-contentious rights-related stuff, look at the stuff that deals with only hardware. 2GB Ram as an ideal amount, with 512GB as a bare minimum? Put it in context with XP, where the recommended minimum is 128MB (or even 64). Hands up anyone who’s ever seen a computer running XP on that. Nobody tries to, and nobody needs to.

PCI Express? I’d bloody well hope that any computer on sale in 2007 claiming to be up-to-date is fully equipped.

And so on.

5

And everyone knows to double MS’s recommended minimum memory requirements, and a few steps up on the processor (and now, I guess the video card), don’t they?

6

Sure, if they misunderstand the difference between ‘recommended’ and ‘minimum’ (note I mentioned both 128 & 64MB?)

7

Well, I wouldn’t run Windows 2000 or Windows XP on less than 256 MB. With 128 MB Windows 2000 tends to page heavily.

8

Heck it’s only with a GIG of RAM that Outlook Express of all programs has stopped chugging.

9

I have have XP running on 128MB and a K6 processor, which matches MS’s minimum for ‘full functionality’. And it ran fine, albeit slowly. The bottleneck on that computer (and of many others of similar specs) was the IDE channels. And in comparison, while Suse 9.3 can cope with a Pentium I, the memory requirements are similar.

10

Scientific-Atlanta’s HD set-top boxes already have this problem. Despite having a DVI interface, HD content cannot be used with it because of restrictions from the content providers. It doesn’t affect me, since I use the HDMI connection anyway, but this is a restriction that is going to felt with all HD devices in the future.