Windows 8 major/minor release

Will Windows 8 (or whatever it will be called) be considered a major or minor release. This seems sort of ridiculous I know as all MS OS releases are considered major releases. When looking at Windows 7 you can argue it was Vista rewired and streamlined. Just wondering how the experts see this from their eyes at this stage or is it too early yet. 

@rodneyMc:If you believe the leaked presentation that's been making the rounds for quite a while, it's shaping up to be a pretty significant release. Of course, that leak is pretty old news, so it's hard to say how things may have changed in the last few months.

@rodneyMc: I'd say that it's a major release. Further modularization of the OS to support having the same core OS running on phones/tablets, PCs, and TVs(Xbox?) means some pretty deep changes under-the-hood.

@rodneyMc:

I consider Vista as major core release. Win7 as major GUI release. I believe win8 is major core release. They will bring roaming internet profile, but, I probably need  GUI tweaks later on.

If you go by the past tick-tock approach Windows 8 should be a major version. 2000 was major and XP cleaned up the mess. Vista was major and Windows 7 cleaned up the mess. So skip windows 8. Windows 9 is the one you want.

Actually, I think 2000 was cleaner and XP messed it up.

@rodneyMc:

http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2011/03/10/steve-ballmer-windows-is-going-to-change-houston-chronicle/

Very interesting perspectives. Thanks for the feedback. " If you go by the past tick-tock approach Windows 8 should be a major version. 2000 was major and XP cleaned up the mess. Vista was major and Windows 7 cleaned up the mess. So skip windows 8. Windows 9 is the one you want. " Nice take gadget

listen me

Ipad (Ios) is a Gadget 

Windows 7 Tablet (example Asus EEE 121 ) is a REAL PC

Windows 8 is Gadget + Real PC

Do you think Ballmer actually has some actual prototypes or just conceptual ideas based on something else, drawings, coffee and donut team meetings. http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2011/03/10/steve-ballmer-windows-is-going-to-change-houston-chronicle/ Ballmer, speaking today at a Houston Technology Center luncheon, said the operating system found on more than 90 percent of today’s PCs will evolve to become something very different. Those changes will be driven by such innovations as sophisticated smartphones and tablet devices.

17 minutes ago, Dovella wrote

Windows 8 is Gadget + Real PC

Yes ! This sounds like what Ballmer is getting at based on his statement "Those changes (OS) will be driven by such innovations as sophisticated smartphones and tablet devices"

It's not clear (at least from the article) whether he has Win8 specifically in mind or if he's talking about the longer-term outlook for Windows in general. Anyway, I'm sure 8 is far enough along by now that there are prototypes and stuff for all the major new features.

I have seen the interviews/presentations and looked at a few of thew concepts(not sure if all are microsoft concepts). What is going to be the major release date for public sector beta testing.    1 more question: I know that Win 8 is supposed to be 128bit and backwards compatible for 64bit but will it still be able to be installed on high end 32 bit systems or is the 32bit system fall under leagacy with no compatibilty

@Jonaconda:I doubt we are going to see a 128 bit version in the Windows 8 timeline. At least, in the sense that we think of 32 or 64 bit software. There also isn't going to be any 128 bit hardware any time soon.

Perhaps they are planning to get started on the ground floor and do some deep architectural stuff, but I have no idea what they could do that would provide benefit to the user. Maybe they could do some magic with the way loads are spread across cores?

The 128 bit (mis)information floating around out there was about 128 bit memory accesses, not about 128 bit computation/processors.  Big difference.  Even that probably won't show up in the win 8 time frame.

It's a safe bet that win 8 is being designed to scale to a large variety of hardware targets (workstations to slates).  All of the server products are probably being baked into the same code base too.  (No reason not to if it is designed right.)

Intel now supports 256-Bit

See for example:

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/3d-vector-normalization-using-256-bit-intel-advanced-vector-extensions-intel-avx/

This 128 bit thing cracks me up. Seriously, there aren't any apps out there that even come close to use the full 64 bit address space. There aren't any machines in the world that have that much pysical memory. Why on earth would someone make a 128 bit CPU and a 128 bit OS?

@Proton2: That's AVX. By that reasoning we already have 128 bit CPUs because the decade old SSE is 128 bit...

Intel to support 512-Bit

" Intel's Larrabee graphic microarchitecture promises two 512-bit SIMD registers on each of its cores (VPU - Wide Vector Processing Units) "

Anybody know where Larrabee buzzed off to?