What does a 128-bit OS mean for software developers?

Question

Microsoft plans to make Windows 8 a 128-bit operating system.

I have always used 32-bit machines. I know that 64-bit is common, but I never went into details to understand how this helps the developer or in general. So my question is - What does a 128-bit OS mean for a software developer?

UPDATE

I asked about this in general. It does not matter if it is a hoax or something else.

Answer 1

This means that the Windows \ System32 directory contains 128-bit DLLs, 64-bit DLL files in WINDOWS \ SysWOW128, and 32-bit DLL files are in WINDOWS \ SysWOW64WOW128.

In the registry, 128-bit applications store data in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE / SOFTWARE, 64-bit applications under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE / SOFTWARE / Wow12864Node and 32-bit applications in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE / SOFTWARE / Wow1286432Node.

This strategy will confuse virus and malware developers so that they refuse. Registered developers will receive a large poster to illustrate redirects and mappings.

Answer 2

Firstly, it depends on whether there will only be 128-bit data registers or address registers.

The first option only means problems for programs that use shifts and overflows.

The second option means that problems with abuse of address arithmetic will also suffer.

BUT: personally, I think that if this message is not a complete BS, it most likely means that MS is trying to make its kernel more agrostatic to support existing 32-bit and 64-bit architectures (ARM comes to mind) not some non-existent 128-bit architecture.

They did this before targeting the i860 during the development of Windows NT. The resulting hardware abstraction layer allows them to support x86, MIPS, Alpha, etc.

Answer 3

340282366920938YB address space
pointers will be 128 bits

many software compatibility issues

64 bits gives an 18EB address space, which I expect will be enough even for supercomputers for quite some time.

Most likely, the real goal is spin marketing

Answer 4

This means that you spent a lot of money if you tried to collect every piece of data on a 128-bit border and some really big integers;)

Answer 5

All these bools in build scripts to generate 32 or 64-bit binaries and installers should become enumerations.

Answer 6

Read carefully. The associated profile that is the source of this "leak" says:

"Research projects including a 128-bit architecture compatible with the Windows 8 kernel and Windows 9."

Nowhere does he declare that any operating system will be 128 bits in the near future.

Answer 7

If you came across this in a bit more detail, you would find out that “128-bit Windows” is for IA-128 architecture. As far as I understand, this should be the successor to IA-64 and, thus, is aimed at the server market. I'm not sure what benefits it will bring to programs, although I suspect that some correctly optimized programs may experience good acceleration, especially cryptographic applications. But anyway, Itanium processors are so rare that you probably never have to worry about them anyway.

Answer 8

They will need to have 128-bit hardware or an emulation level to test it. Sounds interesting.

But users probably don't care. Most non-technical people cannot understand the difference between 64-bit and 32-bit versions other than compatibility issues, and “64-bit is better because the marketing guy said that.”

Answer 9

Try to read a book or just take a look on the Internet on the subject of computer science "Computer Organization". This will explain the details of what x-bits means. In practice, this often means that the limitations of the OS or platform are getting bigger - much bigger. For example, for 16-bit platforms, only about 16 megabytes of RAM can be installed, now a 32-bit processor can support about 4 gigs.