Windows to be redesigned for multi-core chips

Since the release of Windows Vista, Microsoft has been pretty quiet about what we can expect in future versions of the venerable OS. Slowly but surely, however, details are starting to leak out of Redmond, offering glimpses of what we might see on the desktop in about five years or so. Microsoft director of technical strategy Ty Carlson recently made some comments about Windows while sitting on a panel at the Future in Review 2007 conference in San Diego and if his predictions are true, forthcoming versions of Windows will be "fundamentally different," in order to take advantage of future chip designs. "You're going to see in excess of eight, 16, 64 and beyond processors on your client computer," Carlson told panel attendees. Indeed, multi-core seems to be the way that the winds are blowing as of late and while some enthusiasts are using 4 or even 8-core systems, very few of them are running the multithreaded applications and operating systems that are necessary to take full advantage of all that horsepower. As Carlson puts it, Vista was "designed to run on one, two, maybe four processors." As 8-core and higher systems become more commonplace, Microsoft will feel an increasing amount of pressure to produce an OS that's capable of utilizing modern hardware. Let's just hope that the next one doesn't take as long as Vista did to produce.

For more on Carlson's comments:
- see this Ars Technica article