Microsoft BUILD: Windows 8, A Pre-Beta Preview
by Brian Klug & Ryan Smith on September 13, 2011 12:05 PM EST- Posted in
- BUILD
- Windows
- Microsoft
- Windows 8
- Trade Shows
The Technical Side Of Windows 8
As we mentioned in the opening of this article, the single biggest addition to Windows 8 coming from Windows 7 will be Metro. Microsoft’s last major overhaul of Windows’ underpinnings was Windows Vista, and like Windows 7 before it, Microsoft is not looking to significantly alter the operation of the Windows kernel or related systems for Windows 8. With that said this doesn’t mean that there aren’t any technical changes that will ship with Windows 8.
Fundamentally Microsoft wants to keep the system requirements for Windows 8 the same as Windows 7, which means it needs to run (with varying definitions of “smoothly”) on a 1GHz CPU paired with 1GB of RAM and a DX9 class GPU. Realistically as their published requirements stand there is one difference from Windows 7: Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM). Windows 7 would work with older XPDM drivers (albeit without any of the benefits of WDDM), however Windows 8 specifically mentions WDDM as a requirement. This makes sense given the greater reliance on the GPU for Metro, but it also means there are going to be some machines out there using very early DX9 GPUs (e.g. Intel GMA 900) that won’t be able to run Windows 8 due to a lack of video drivers.
In any case the addition of ARM into the mix will be sure to spice things up., While Microsoft is optimizing Windows 8 to run on ARM CPUs there’s a vast range of ARM CPUs, and this is the full version of Windows. Microsoft’s current system requirements are easily discernable as x86 based, and we’d expect the ARM requirements to be fairly high to keep pace. Give the launch of quad core ARM SoCs later this year, it’s likely that will be a popular pairing with Windows 8 when it launches.
On a final note about system requirements, while Microsoft isn’t talking about specific versions of Windows 8 at this time, they’ve made it clear that x86 will live on for at least one more generation in order to fulfill their desire to have Windows 8 run on everything Windows 7 ran on. So x86 versions of Windows should be expected.
Moving on, as this was a press session as opposed to a technical session, Microsoft was a bit light on the details. We’re expecting quite a bit more in the next couple of days, but for the moment we’ve only been briefed on a few user-facing technologies that are new to Windows 8.
On the hardcore side of things, Microsoft has added a few tricks to Windows in order to keep memory usage from growing and to make the OS better suited for tablets. On the memory side they have added Page Combining, which will combine duplicate memory pages into a single page. This is primarily to reduce the overhead from multiple applications all having copies of the same shared resource by having applications outright share that resource’s memory pages. Page Combining will primarily be a tool for reclaiming memory when memory usage is approaching critical levels.
For making the OS better suited for tablet hardware, Microsoft has focused on small changes that can help the hardware sleep longer and wake up less often. Coalescing system timers and a dynamic tick mechanism are two such features that will be coming to Windows 8 (unfortunately we don’t have any more details on their function at this time). Meanwhile Metro will play a big part in making Windows tablet friendly, as Metro applications will be designed from the start to be able to handle phone/tablet style process management. This is to say that discarded applications will continue to stay open as a background application, having all of their memory pages intact but unable to schedule CPU time so long as they’re a background application. They’ll remain in this state until the OS decides to evict them, at which point they need to be able to gracefully shut down and resume when the user re-launches the application. Internally Microsoft calls this freezing and rehydrating an application.
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Booster - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
Exaclty. MS needs to get rid of Julie Larson-Green, the infamous inventor of the wretched ribbon and I suspect this abomination.BioTurboNick - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
The ribbon is great. I'm sorry that you love trudging through menus to find the things you want.frozentundra123456 - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
I agree with Booster. I absolutely hate the ribbon in Microsoft Office. It may add a lot of things that menus didnt have, but most of them are worthless. It requires considerably more steps to do simple tasks.The ribbon may be OK for someone who uses Office all day, every day, for business tasks. But I use it in a scientific setting, and just want to use the basic commands as quickly and easily as possible. For this kind of use, I really, really hate the ribbon.
ph0tek - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
How did you manage to post that on DOS?Anyway... I bet the vast majority of people making the kind of comments as yourself are pretty old. Either that or just stupid. The Ribbon is better. Not debatable. New users of Office all agree it's better and do far better using it, thats a fact.
On Win 8 you can even customise the ribbon, or make a quick access bar with your own most used ribbon buttons. Instant access. You can get more quicker or efficient than that.
cjs150 - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
No the ribbon is not better. I am a power user of word, our documents often run to 100 pages, with tables of contents, multiple level headings and paragraphs, track changes, charts and tables. When we get board we throw in columns as well.Let me take a simple example that happens all the time. Your document has track changes on it but is formatted incorrectly (for example you need to use keep with next). Right clicking the mouse will not bring up paragrpah settings because according to MS the context is tracking changes, so you go up to the ribbon, which is of course stuck in review mode because that was the last time you used it to switch track changes on, now scroll back to the home section of the ribbon, Where are the paragraph settings? - Not obviously there, you have to click on the little arrow in the bottom right of the paragraph tile on the ribbon and finally you have got what you needed.
And they call that an improvement?
The ribbon is fine for people who write a letter once every few days, but a complete waste of effort for business
BioTurboNick - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
That sounds like an imperfect implementation, not a problem with the interface style per se.quanta - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
Since the introduction of Windows XP themes, the usable screen spaces have been on the decline.First of all, the default XP themes wasted more spaces by creating bigger margins/paddings between interactive screen elements just to fit pretty effects instead of making more efficient use of the same UI margins found in Classic theme while dressing up the visual.
Then came Windows Vista's Aero, which wastes even more space by switching to Segoe UI, where in its default configuration, has a bigger font sizes than the already inflated XP theme. Worse still, Segoe UI is one of the later ClearType-optimized fonts that looks blurry even after tuning, and ClearType itself isn't even designed for alternate subpixel layouts like non-aperture grille CRTs and Sharp Quattron (ClearType is only defined for 3-subpixel array, not 4-subpixel), making the default Vista UI look even worse on old and new monitors. Shrinking Segoe UI may have saved some screen estate, but the ClearType-tuned fonts are optimized for larger point sizes than the venerable Tahoma or even Microsoft Sans Serif, so it trades one compromise with another. The screen margin wastage is even worse than the XP themes. With all these new-fangled update, one would expect it the Aero UI will be more customizable, but it is not. You may be able to adjust the theme colours of Aero, but if you want to switch the colour of single elements such as (in)active menu bar or title, or switch the Aero font, YOU CAN'T! Well, at least not without hacking the system libraries[1], or going through the pain of editing the features with tools not supplied with the operating system, or use the Windows Classic theme. Windows 7 may have the mean of using the UI to build custom theme[2], but there is still zero method for conserving screen estates using Aero theme unless manually editing .theme files[3].
In this next Windows iteration, the incorporation of ribbon just add more clutter to the desktop. While the ribbon is needed for touchscreen uses, the way it is organized is far from most efficient. Does the ribbon really need text description over a button group for the buttons that already have descriptions on them? Desktop aside, the Metro fails to reuse the ribbon on the desktop UI, which would have provide a more consistent experience when switching between Metro and desktop, and even with the already bloated Windows 7-based UI, the ribbon layout still uses screen space more efficiently than Metro.
[1] http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/how-t...
[2] http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/create...
[3] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb773190%2...
Impulses - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
Anyone else concerned that Win 8's multiple display support will be pretty hobbled? I'm already iffy on the whole Metro style, switching back to Metro to open unpinned apps when working on the traditional desktop seems horribly inefficient... But I don't see how that's gonna scale across multiple displays, I guess ideally you could leave the start panel with it's live tiles on a second screen, but MS has a history of ignoring multiple display users...We still rely on 3rd party tools to extend the taskbar or fine tune wallpapers across three displays... It's a shame too because after multiple cores and SSDs, multiple displays has been the biggest productivity boost I've gained thru hardware in the last 10 years.
BioTurboNick - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
http://www.winsupersite.com/article/windows8/windo...Multiple monitor support is improved. Though this is just the desktop, not Metro.
CSMR - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 - link
That was fast. Thanks for the info Anand!