The prevailing consensus about Windows 8 is that it will be launched in 2012, 3 years from now. The second rumor is that it will be a 128 bit operating system.
Now it seems that both notions are not true, at least Microsoft is not confirming them.
Here is how the rumors started. Back in October 2009, a Microsoft Spokesman, Robert Morgan, who was a “senior member of Microsoft’s Research & Development team,” stated that his current projects included, “128-bit architecture compatibility with the Windows 8 kernel and Windows 9 project plan.” This information appeared in the social website LinkedIn.com. LinkedIn is a social organizing website that allows business users to connect with other business users.
Well now it turns out that there may not be any Robert Morgan. What makes us say that? Two things. First the Linkedin page has been removed, although the cached version can be seen here. So the LinkedIn page does not exist. Secondly, Microsoft, when asked about Robert Morgan the reply was that “Microsoft has no comment regarding Robert Morgan.” Obviously Microsoft does not intend to condone the process of information given out by one of its employees, bypassing its official press outlet. So you can quash rumors with a “no comment” style reply even if it is about one of their employees.
So then, if the LinkedIn page was a fake, and there is no Robert Morgan, then the comments about the launch date, 2012, and the size of the OS kernel, 128 bits, are suspect; at worse they are false.
Steve Balmer has been emphatic about releasing information about Windows8, basically disclosing nothing except that it is under development. For Balmer, all of the public attention is on Windows7 and its deployment.
Where then does this leave Windows8 development? At this point rumors and speculation may be greater than the existence of actual facts. Yet while this may be the case, one can infer what kind of information may be under development by looking at its competitors.
Google, for one, is interested in presenting the next generation of Chrome as a cloud based OS. Whether it is 128 or not is not verified, and the actual launch date. But the competition that it may be presenting to Microsoft may force it to respond in kind.
Get a clue. There are no 128-bit CPUs.
there are 128 bit computers. my motherboard supports it and i built my computer this past January.
there are 128-bit cpus, google it, and robert morgan http://www.linkedin.com/in/msftrobertmorgan
NO 128-but CPUs – in Wikipedia’s words, “There are currently no mainstream general-purpose processors built to operate on 128-bit integers or addresses, though a number of processors do operate on 128-bit data.” The Intel Core2 Duo chip in my laptop has 128-bit SIMD registers (for SSE stuff), and top-end video cards have up to 2×512-bit data bus and also wide SIMD cores. But *none* of these qualify as “128 bit CPUs” or “128 bit computers”. Call me again when you have a motherboard&CPU that can handle 2^128 bytes of memory – I don’t even demand capacity for that much physical memory, virtual capacity will do fine. Most current 64-bit computers have a much smaller number of address lines in the chipset so they can’t be configured with 2^64 bytes of physical RAM; but the OS can manage all this virtual space if you have a big enough pagefile. BTW, 128 bits are something as big, that you won’t be able to buy any system, even supercomputer, with this much DISK space, let alone memory. And this limit will NOT be surpassed in the next decades or even millenia. Check http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/128_bit_stor…
Finally someone else who realises how insane an idea this is. I have never replied to any of these “128bit” posts before because I was always under the impression that they were complex troll posts of some kind.
You have rekindled my faith that some people on here actually know WTF they are talking about. Thank you.