Archive for April 27th, 2009
Windows 7 Will Include “Windows XP Mode”
Posted by The Right Guy in Uncategorized on April 27th, 2009
Windows 7 wants to be your trusted upgrade from Windows XP—so much so that the Redmond giant will offer a virtualized “Windows XP Mode” in Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate editions when they drop.
It won’t be baked directly into the Windows 7 Release Candidate, the free download officially due out May 5 but already circulating on BitTorrent. Instead, an XP Mode plugin will be made available as a free download for Release Candidate users and, eventually, paid Professional and Ultimate users.
What’s XP mode? According to Windows watcher Paul Thurrott, it’s a licensed, virtualized copy of Windows XP Service Pack 3 running inside Microsoft’s own Virtual PC framework, customized and framed to allow anyone who needs a picky XP application to run to simply install it while XP Mode is enabled, then have it run as a virtualized app in the future without thinking about it.It is, in a way, a 100% compatibility promise, but it remains to be seen how smoothly Virtual PC can be integrated into Windows 7 itself.
Also unknown is just how XP Mode will be licensed and provided. It’s a certain no-go on the Starter and Home editions of Windows 7 meant for notebooks and lower-end PCs, but there’s now word on whether XP Mode will be restricted to corporate licenses or available for retail and new PC customers.
Does a licensed, virtualized XP running inside Windows 7 change your outlook on the OS? Tell us your take in the comments.
GPU’s to do more accelerating in Leopard and Windows 7
Posted by The Right Guy in Hardware, Nvidia on April 27th, 2009
Nvidia says
Nvidia’s product manager for Tesla producs, Sumit Gupta, recently said how new programming environments will utilize GPUs to accelerate software in OS X Snow Leopard and Windows 7 operating systems. Nvidia seems to be keen on proving the world that graphics cards are not solely for gaming, and thus the GPGPU acronym (General Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units).
OpenCL, a framework for writing programs which execute across platform containing CPUs, GPUs and potentially other processors, would enable users to more effectively utilize the potential that GPUs obviously pack, and even Apple on its website says that OpenCL will make it possible for developers to „efficiently tap the vast gigaflops of computing power currently locked up in the graphics processing unit.“
In a nutshell, this means that graphics do so much more in the future, as having a CPU and a GPU in your system will mean there’re two workhorses to rely on, where both processing units will work together and divide the tasks among themselves. An example was cited as running Google’s Picasa on the CPU, but as soon as you choose an image and apply a filter, the GPU would take over.
Since interfaces in our OSs are obviously visual, it would make more sense for the GPU to handle it than the CPU Mr. Gupta also said. However, this doesn’t in any way mean that CPUs are not needed as he also added how „If you’re running an unpredictable task, the CPU is the jack of all trades“.
More here.