128bit OS coming

Year 2009/10 was the first time I remember 128bit OS being discussed. There was speculation that Windows 8 was going to be 128bit, however that obviously never happened. Maybe Windows 9 (a teaser for sure)! I have noticed that a lot of hardware manufacturers put Windows 8/64 as the preferred OS, with the option to change it to 32, so I assume 64 is now considered the standard. Wonder if 128bit has died off for some reason or other. Anyone aware of anything in the works? I can not find anything.

 

I doubt so, at least not in the near future (and I hope not). As it is, 64-bit is good enough for the computing power that we have right now for the masses. Then, there's the issue of lacking official support for native 64-bit apps such as within the mainstream browsers (Chrome, Firefox) and media players (VLC) on Windows for example. I'd rather we (OS makers, developers, users) work together on the ongoing transition to 64-bit first.

Anyway, a good reading here:
http://superuser.com/questions/49549/when-are-we-going-128-bit-how-it-will-be-what-gets-better

 

Agreed. I remember when there were claims that Windows 7 would have a 128 bit version, and they claimed Vista would be the last version to be offered in 32 bit. None of that happened, and won't any time soon.

 

You have to ask what problem a 128 bit OS would solve or what benefit it would provide? The need to create enough memory space to multitask applications is (in part) what has driven the move from 16 bit to 32 bit and now 64 bit. It took a while, but we have actually started to hit the 4 gigabyte ceiling of the 32 bit OS and the 64 bit OS is the solution for that. The 64 bit OS can theoretically address 16 exbibytes (look it up) which is so far beyond where we are now that I don't believe the ceiling will be reached in our lifetimes. As a practical matter Windows 7 pro/ultimate/enterprise can address 192 gigabytes of ram, which is far beyond what current personal computer hardware can support. In other words a 128 bit OS is currently a solution looking for a problem

 

What for?
Mrk

 

And that's the problem. Had windows 7 become pure 64 bit OS we wouldn't have Chrome and Firefox 32 bit nonsense.

 

Not sure what you mean by "pure 64 bit". Are you suggesting no backward compatibility with 32 bit software? That would be a hard sell.

 

Windows 7 64-bit is a 64-bit OS (or 48-bit if you want).
Mrk

 

I think mattdocs12345 is talking about if Windows 7 had only 64-bit editions. No separate 32-bit version. However one could argue that keeping 32-bit compatibility would not encourage/force developers to switch their software to 64-bit. Personally have an all 64-bit Windows (OS), a la Linux, would be nice though not practical.

 

VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) processors - including 128 bit width words - have been around since about 2000, but only used for special purpose industrial computational use. Give it time, i.e. someday when it makes sense from a technology market point of view as computing technology gets ever so smaller than now for the general purpose consumer market place. At any rate, it will be a long way off from now.

-- Tom

 

If Windows 7 had been pure 64-bit, nothing 32-bit would run.