views:

429

answers:

8

Microsoft is planning to make Windows 8 an 128-bit operating system.

I have always used 32-bit machines. I know 64-bit are common as well but I never went into details to understand how does it help a developer or in general. So my question is - What does 128-bit OS mean to a software developer?

UPDATE

I asked about this in general. It doesn't matter if it is a hoax or whatever.

+2  A: 

It means a whole lot of wasted ram if you're trying to get every piece of data to line up on a 128bit boundary, and some really big integers ;)

Shane MacLaughlin
+1  A: 

All those bools in build scripts to generate 32 or 64 bit binaries and installers have to become enumerations.

Steve Gilham
A: 

340282366920938YB address space
pointers will be 128bit

lots of software compatibility problems

64 bits gives 18EB address space which I expect will be enough even for supercomputers for quite a while.

Most likely it's real purpose is marketing spin

gnibbler
The 128-bit thing is only about the width of data words, not the size of pointers. These two were the same in 32- and 64-bit, but they have been different in 8-bit computers that addressed 64KiB of memory, and would be different again. 128-bit pointers are probably not going to happen on this planet, because of physic contraints, assuming one atom is necessary to encode one bit.
Pascal Cuoq
The most significant change from 32 bit to 64 bit OS in my opinion is the address space per process. The size of the data word has nothing to do with the OS! The size of the data word is up to the CPU and the compiler. Like I said - its all marketing spin
gnibbler
+2  A: 

Read carefully. The linkedin profile that is the source of this "leak" says:

"Research & Development projects including 128-bit architecture compatibility with the Windows 8 kernel and Windows 9 project plan."

Nowhere does it state that any OS will be 128 bit any time soon.

Wouter van Nifterick
I know .. not any time soon. But I asked about in general. It doesn't matter if it is a hoax or whatever.
Wbdvlpr
+10  A: 

It means that the Windows\System32 directory contains 128bit DLLs, 64bit DLLs in WINDOWS\SysWOW128, and 32bit DLLs are in WINDOWS\SysWOW64WOW128.

In the registry, 128bit applications store data under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE, 64bit applications under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Wow12864Node, and 32bit applications under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Wow1286432Node.

This strategy will confuse virus and malware developers so much that they give up. Registered developers will receive a large poster to illustrate the redirects and mappings.

devio
A: 

If you had googled around a bit more about this, you would have found out that the "128-bit Windows" is meant for the IA-128 architecture. As I understand, this should be the successor of IA-64 and thus aimed at the server market. I'm not sure what benefits it would give programs, although I suspect that some properly optimized programs could experience good speedups, especially cryptography applications. But anyway - Itanium CPUs are so rare that you probably won't ever have to worry about them anyway.

Vilx-
+3  A: 

First, it depends on whether there would be only 128-bits data registers or address registers to.

First variant means only problems for programs exploiting shifts and overflows.

Second variant means that problems abusing address arithmetics will suffer too.

BUT: personally, I think if this message is not complete BS, this will more probably mean that MS tries to make its kernel more hardware agnostic to support existing 32-bit and 64-bit architectures (ARM comes to mind), not some non-existant 128-bit architecture.

They did it before targeting i860 during development Windows NT. Resulting hardware abstraction layer allown them to support x86, MIPS, Alpha etc.

elder_george
A: 

They would have to have 128-bit hardware or emulation layer to test it. Sounds interesting.

But the users probably don't care that much. Most non-technical people can't really understand the difference between 64-bit and 32-bit other than compatibility problems and "64-bits are better because marketing guy said so".

phjr