Microsoft accidentally pushed an internal build of Windows 10 to the public recently, causing some smartphones to stop working. That’s the bad news. The good news? The leaked Windows builds included some clues about upcoming software from Microsoft.
After doing a little more digging, @AndItsTito spotted the first mentions of Windows 10 Pro for Advanced PCs, Windows 10 Pro N for Advanced PCs, and Windows Server 2016. Then WalkingCat and @GrandMofongo followed up with a few leaked slides showing that the “Advanced PC” builds would be called Windows 10 Pro for Workstation PCs.
In a nutshell, the new “Pro for Workstation” operating system is designed for use on “a high-end machine” and feature optimizations for enterprise customers.
Among other things, that means you get:
- Workstation mode, which optimizes Windows for the best possible performance for “typical compute and graphics intensive workloads”
- A replacement for the NTFS file system called Resilient file system, or ReFS, which “is designed for fault-tolerance, optimized for handling large data volume, auto-correcting,” and other features
- SMBDirect protocol for faster file transfers
- Support for machines with up to 4 CPUs and up to 6TB of memory
That last one should give you an idea of what Microsoft means when it says “high-end machine.” This is probably not an operating system you’ll find installed on consumer-oriented computers.
via The Verge
Might I suggest a name for it, instead of Pro, let’s call it:
Windows 10 NT.
Windows 10 already is NT.
Sorry you missed the joke. You must be fun at parties.
As someone with a workstation this is relevant to my interests (only 2 sockets though). I wonder what they mean by optimising for common heavy workloads, there’s surely not much you could do after setting high performance mode, setting a processes’ priority to high and whatnot.
ReFS sounds familiar, I think I tried it out but they wouldn’t let you boot off it with good reason. Doesn’t make much sense if you boot off a local SSD and use it to scratch space while the bulk of your storage is on the network somewhere.
SMBDirect’s based on Remote Direct Memory Access, seems to be more of a thing on 10gbit+ NICs.
*shrug* not much of interest to me but someone with a more modern network (I’m still on 1gbit and will be until my storage cluster grows) might see some benefit from all this.
ReFS released with Server 2012, but because so many applications require NTFS-specific features it’s been only useful for massive conventional data volumes. Unfortunately, since it’s not considered fully stable, it’s not even used in those cases.
Gotcha, though why I’d have that as part of my workstation I do not know, IMO storage should be separate. In the same way that you wouldn’t let little Nancy use your birth certificate as a chopping board, users doing potentially destructive things should be as far away from important documents as possible.