L3 already exists in AMD’s ‘Barcelona’ architecture and have been hinted for Intel’s ‘Nehalem’, which will succeed the current Core micro-architecture in the second half of 2008. (In fact, if Windows 7 breaks cover towards the end of 2010 it’ll be accompanied by Intel’s post-Nehalem Core microarchitecture revision, codenamed Gesher.)
Also, considering that Nehalem will debut with eight cores in a single die, there’s no reason we couldn’t see a string of single cores each being set aside for running a VM, with a flash drive used to hold and launch the virtual machine software in order to dramatically boost session speed, especially during the ‘transition states’ of startup and shutdown which represent so much of the VM overhead.
PCs will also sport obscene amounts of memory: 4GB will likely be equivalent to today’s ‘entry level’ of 1GB, with flash drives used in concert with hard drives to actively store files rather than just be a shot-term cache.
And one more possible Windows Seven screenshot: This one looks rather like a doctored version of Vista, but you never know...It’s worth noting that virtualisation is comparable to how Mac OS X handles Mac OS 9 software: a ‘classic environment’ is launched, creating a sandbox instance of OS 9 (although you can run only one Classic process per user).
Apple used this approach to make the leap from OS 9 to OS X, which was in reality an all-new operating system sporting a UI which mimicked the more familiar elements of OS 9.
Might Microsoft be planning the same seismic shift for Windows? The OS itself has already entered in its second decade, and the 32-bit NT codebase underpinning the current Windows generation is already nudging 15 years from its 1993 launch in Windows NT 3.1.
There’s no reason to rule out the concept of Microsoft resetting the clock to zero with Windows 7: releasing an all-new OS built from the ground up as an operating system for 2010 but with the ability to support pre-7 ‘classic’ apps – which by then will mainly be relatively modern XP and Vista software – in virtual machine sessions.
Eye candy, begone: MinWin is so lean that even the Windows flag on the splash screen is rendered using ASCIIWe do know that the next generation of Windows will be built around a stripped-back ‘microkernel’ codenamed MinWin. As previously reported, MinWin has been described as “the Windows 7 source-code base”.
MinWin is currently an internal project to strip back the NT kernel to the barest of bare metal, but will be used “to build all the products based on Windows” said Microsoft engineer Eric Traut during a demonstration of Microsoft’s virtualisation technology at the University of Illinois in October.
“It’s not just the OS that’s running on many laptops in this room, it’s also the OS used for media centres, for servers, for small embedded devices.”
As ‘proof of concept’, Traut showed an iteration of MinWin consisting of just 100 system files, which occupied 25MB of hard disk space and ran in 40MB of RAM.
“It’s still bigger than I’d like it to be, but we’ve taken a shot at really stripping out all of the layers above and making sure that we had a clean architectural layer there”.
More speculative is the question of WinFS, which sits atop the NTFS file system to allow data to be stored, accessed and managed based on relationships with other data. WinFS was originally to use the Yukon database engine of SQL Server 2005, which included native support for XML, but became the first of Vista’s many ‘foundation pillars’ to topple -- primarily because Microsoft couldn't get the speed of the system remotely close to something a user would consider acceptable compared to the relatively simpler NTFS file system in use today.
Despite initial promises that it would be released in the year following the launch of Vista, the last news on WinFS was that some of its technologies have been rolled into the Katmai engine of SQL Server 2008. Microsoft may well forge ahead with a relationship-savvy file system in Windows 7, built around the Katmai engine, but the ‘WinFS’ label could remain buried.
Red, as in hell: another possible screenshot of Windows 7?
There’s no doubt that Windows 7.0 will sport a revised interface. It was Sinofky’s winning gamble to give Office 2007 an all-new UI which swapped the decades-old clutter of menus, toolbars, task panes and what-not for a single task-aware ‘ribbon’.
Office 2007’s UI overhaul itself was led by Julie Larson-Green, who (as reported earlier this year) Sikofsky has since tapped to head the &ldq上一页 [1] [2] [3] 下一页
打印文档
推荐好友 
返回顶部
增大字体 
减少字体