Re: OS/2 and eCS future

William L. Hartzell wrote:
Sir:
All I knows is this time next year you be able to buy quad core
processors and neither Vista nor XP will run on them, without you paying
for a server license.
Wrong, XP /Vista lics are by Processor not Cores.
Home 1 Processor socket
Pro 2 Processors socket
So XP-Home and its Vista counterpart run fine on
- 1 Intel CPU with HT enabled showing 2 CPUs (1 phys + 1 Virtual)
- 1 DualCore AMD showing 2 CPUs ( 2 phys cores )
- 1 DualCore Intel with HT showing 4 CPUs (2 phys + 2 virtual)
XP Pro and its vista counterpart run fine on the above and on
- 2 Intel CPU with HT enabled showing 2 CPUs (2 phys + 2 Virtual)
- 2 DualCore AMD showing 2 CPUs ( 4 phys cores )
- 2 DualCore Intel with HT showing 8 CPUs (4 phys + 4 virtual)

And they'll run fine on quad core CPUs as well as Intel/AMD have
enhanced
the CPUID flags used for CPU enumeration so the OS can determine how
many cores
are in a processor and if they are real and/or virtual CPUs (Intel HT).
This information
is then be used by the sheduler to keep processes/threads local on
intel CPUs as
the HT cpu and its physical brother share many resources and the
different cores in one
intel CPU at least share the cache. So a Process moving form the
local CPU/processor socket to a different on results in cache trashing
and would degrade
performance.

We know that 3-d desktops are in the pipeline and that they will not
arrive for about six-ten years, with the version of Windows after Vista.
Until then, there is no compelling reason for users to move away from
32-bit platforms.
There are lot of other reasons besides 3d desktops.
Like CAD, DMU (Digital MockUp), PLM (Product Livecycle Management)
DTP, Photoshop or editing video HDTV which takes lots of RAM

And keep in mind on OS/2 all old Apps incl WPS are bound to the 512MiBi
Bytelimit and even
less shared memory even with Apps using HMA can't handle to large
objects as the
HMA usually ends at 3.5GiBi Byte (PCI Space even less if you have a
512MiBi Byte Graphics card and other addons) and is deviced up into
shared and app RAM. So you end a 1.5GiBi max object size per App.

On Windows the situation is a bit better as the memory is not that
fragmented and you can get close to 2.5-3 GiBi Byte (OS loads to base
3GiBi) for the App.
Still not that much for memory hungry Apps like mentioned above.
With 64Bits Vista and XP you get an advantage as each 32Bit process get
their own virtual
4GiBi Byte range so with 8GiBi Physial RAM in a system you can run 3
32Bit aps taking 2.5 GiBi Ram each without the system starting to swap.

As for the future of OS/2 on moderrn HW.
Next generation Intel Reference Platform'll drop the BIOS and move to
EFI like Apple Intel Macs already did.
And without the BIOS the OS/2 kernel won't even boot on such HW.

.

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