Tätä lukiessa tulee mieleen että kuinka paljon konetehoa oikeasti tarvitaan jonkun pirun tekstinkäsittelyohjelman tai taulukkolaskennan ajamiseen? Pysyvätkö läppärit kehityksen vauhdissa vai tehdäänkö niille riisuttu versio Windowsista? Harvassa läppärissä taitaa olla vielä yli 64Mt videomuistia, ja Vista haluaisi 256Mt tai enemmän. Ja sen lisäksi vielä kaksi gigaa järjestelmämuistia.
A Tech Strategist within Microsoft, Nigel Page, has gone on record to
discuss the hardware requirements for Windows Vista, due out next
Christmas.
What he's said is kind of shocking.
System breakdown
Graphics: Vista has changed from using the CPU to display bitmaps on
the screen to using the GPU to render vectors. This means the entire
display model in Vista has changed. To render the screen in the GPU
requires an awful lot of memory to do optimally - 256MB is a happy
medium, but you'll actually see benefit from more. Microsoft believes
that you're going to see the amount of video memory being shipped on
cards hurtle up when Vista ships.
CPU: Threading is the main target for Vista. Currently, very little of
Windows XP is threaded - the target is to make Vista perform far better
on dual-core and multi-core processors.
RAM: 2GB is the ideal configuration for 64-bit Vista, we're told. Vista
32-bit will work ideally at 1GB, and minimum 512. However, since 64-bit
is handling data chunks that are double the size, you'll need double
the memory, hence the 2GB. Nigel mentions DDR3 - which is a little odd,
since the roadmap for DDR3, on Intel gear at least, doesn't really kick
in until 2007.
HDD: SATA is definitely the way forward for Vista, due, Microsoft tells
us, to Native Command Queueing. NCQ allows for out of order completions
- that is, if Vista needs tasks 1,2,3,4 and 5 done, it can do them in
the order 2,5,3,4,1 if that's a more efficient route for the hard drive
head to take over the disk. This leads to far faster completion times.
NCQ is supported on SATA2 drives, so expect them to start becoming the
standard sooner rather than later. Microsoft thinks that these features
will provide SCSI-level performance.
Bus: AGP is 'not optimal' for Vista. Because of the fact that graphics
cards may have to utilise main system memory for some rendering tasks,
a fast, bi-direction bus is needed - that's PCI express.
Display: Prepare to feel the red mist of rage - no current TFT monitor
out there is going to support high definition playback in Vista. You
may already have heard rumblings about this, but here it is. To play
HD-DVD or Blu-Ray content you need a HDCP compatible monitor. Why?
Because these formats use HDCP to encrypt a video signal as it travels
along a digital connection to an output device, to prevent people
copying it. If you have just standard DVI or even an analogue output,
you're going to see HD scaled down to a far-less-than-HD resolution for
viewing - which sucks. This isn't really Microsoft's fault - HDCP is
something that content makers, in their eternal wisdom, have decided is
necessary to stop us all watching pirated movies. Yay.