Let me get this straight… 32-bit computers have lasted nearly twenty years, if memory serves me (I got my first 80386 motherboard in late 1991). In the last year or so, Microsoft has managed to get 64-bit Windows adopted, giving us access to 16 exabytes of RAM (“approximately 17.2 billion gigabytes,” according to this Wikipedia article) — a literally astronomical number, far larger than the largest hard drives today or in the foreseeable future, let alone RAM size. And they’re already planning a 128-bit OS for two or three years from now?! In the name of all that’s holy, why?!
(One possibility… they might be aiming for a toe-hold on the ridiculously-huge lawsuit crowd. 😉 )
I have to agree, I mean sheesh, 99% of the people with 64 bit hardware is only running 32 bit software. I think they should at least wait until 64 bit software is mainstream before jumping to 128 bit. Is there even 128 bit hardware in the planning stages? Talk about lop sided, if it were a race the hardware side is running at breakneck speeds while the software side isn’t even out of the starting blocks yet.
I guess they just want to see who is dumb, dumber and dumbest.
Even with only 32-bit software, there’s a reasonably good excuse for a 64-bit OS — the 64-bit OS can address more than 4GB of memory, as I said earlier. But I don’t see what use a 128-bit OS is yet… as you say, 128-bit hardware isn’t even available yet. Though it must be planned, or Microsoft wouldn’t have anything to run 128-bit Windows on.
(Oh, and about hardware outpacing software — that’s nothing new, it has always been the case.)
I heard that the reason is that they’re going to do something like ZFS. ZFS is 128 bit I think.
Hm… that might explain it. They could be going 128-bit for the server version of Windows, with their new file system, and 64-bit for the desktop version. I still don’t see any technical need for it (ZFS can run even under a 32-bit OS, after all), but it sounds like the kind of market segmentation that business types are always trying to come up with.