Hefty hardware requirements for Windows Vista
http://www.apcstart.com/teched/pivot/entry.php?id=6

Hardware vendors are going to love the news that Windows Vista is going to need very beefy hardware to run well. At Microsoft's TechEd conference, Dan Warne finally managed to squeeze blood from a stone ? or rather, answers about Longhorn's hardware requirements from Microsoft.

Nigel Page is a strategist with Microsoft Australia. He told APC today that Vista would work best on a video card with more than 256MB RAM, 2GB of DDR3 memory and a S-ATA 2 hard drive.

Super-phat video cards mandatory

Here's what he said, more-or-less verbatim (we left out boring bits).

"Video is probably the most critical hardware item for Vista. Things have changed very significantly.

"There's a completely new driver model in Vista called the Longhorn Display Driver Model ? LDDM. There has been an explosion in the capabilities of graphics chips ? they're almost universally 3D vector graphics now ? and the driver model today we have is bitmap.

In Longhorn we are switching from drawing bitmap graphics ? dots - to vector graphics ? lines and shapes. Rather than painting these bits on the screen, we are now asking the GPU to paint a circle. That means you can scale pictures up and down to an infinite degree and they won't go furry on you.

"One of the things you'll notice about Vista beta 1 is that it runs dramatically quicker than Windows XP. The reason is the GPU is now doing a lot of work that the CPU used to have to do. There are a couple of gotchas though. The GPU needs a very high speed bi-directional bus to communicate with main memory. That has not been the case in the past, and what it means is that AGP will not be optimal.

"The reason is that one of the things the LDDM can do is allow a video card to back stuff off into the PC's main memory if it has a particularly intensive task and needs the video RAM to work in. That's an intensely bi-directional type of communication.

"The GPU will need a plenty of room to operate in Vista. The more memory you put on a video card the better really. We want the least dumping back to main memory because that's slower than graphics. If you have 128MB that's good, if you have 256MB that's better, but I expect that video card memory will go up a lot when Longhorn is released.

You say P-ATA, I say S-ATA (but really, start thinking NCQ)

"There are different flavours of S-ATA drives out there. A lot of first generation ones out there did nothing more than have a different connection style ? they had a S-ATA to P-ATA bridge. Basically you got cleaner cabling and not much else.

"S-ATA 1 has now evolved into S-ATA 2. The link speed has gone from 150Mbit/s to 300Mbit/s but despite what people think, that's not the big deal.

"Native command queuing (NCQ) is standard in S-ATA 2 and that cannot be done on S-ATA 1 drives that were simply S-ATA to P-ATA bridge drives. NCQ means drive tasks can be reordered in the most efficient path for the heads to move.

"That means Windows Vista desktop PCs will be able to have asynchronous completion ? the operating system won't have to wait for one task to complete before going on to something else ? the same way SCSI drives work today.

"We can also DMA the results of drive requests straight back into main memory. That means drives can send information directly into main memory, and it can raise a single interrupt to notify the OS that the drive has completed request 1, 3, 7 and 10, for example. That's much more efficient than waiting for one task to complete then doing another.

"So what we'll have with S-ATA 2 are IDE drives that work just like SCSI drives. SCSI has always been way too pricey for desktop use. But now you can get an "effective" SCSI drive of 250GB for $215. You're right up to SCSI drive speed with S-ATA-2.

Your PC will run faster with dual core, really it will.

"In order to get the real benefit from dual or multi-core chips you'd think that we have to have very well threaded applications. We don't have very well threaded apps today; in fact Outlook is probably the best [Microsoft app] in terms of doing things in the background.

"But if you look at a standard desktop machine, there are a lot of separate processes running in the background, which can now be split across multiple processes, so you really are going to see performance improvement for OS support for multicore.

Big trouble in little Hollywood

"The horse has really bolted with respect to DVDs. They're out there, people cannibalise them all the time with DVD decrypters and people can get movies off them like there's no tomorrow.

"The industry needed something much better to deal with the piracy problem. Studios said in a high-def world, we're going to have to have a very different way of viewing content.

"In Longhorn, the computer determines that a video card is not faked or being intercepted, so there's a lot of onus on the writers of the drivers. It also checks If there are digital or analogue drivers. If only digital outputs are in use, it will then check a display has HDCP capability ? high bandwidth digital content protection. The communication between the video card and the device is encrypted and only decrypted by the display device itself. If all that is true, the operating system says, "ok, gotcha, we are running on a protected video path which is OK for premium content? HD-DVDs, BluRay, or a video file that someone has marked."

"If you don't comply with PVP, we're going to downscale the quality upon playback? you're going to get a lower quality version; you're not going to get the high def content the way it was intended to be viewed. You'll find that most plasma displays have HDCP already. But this isn't available in computer monitors. I have not been able to find a single monitor that supports it. We are going to see a lot of change in this space.

"We have more information at Output Content Protection and Windows Longhorn

"The hardware vendors all know about it but aren't yet making monitors with it built in, so now it's up to you [the users] to say, "where's my HDCP?"

"There's a LOT of encryption and decryption going on. We communicate on the PCI Express bus in a fully encrypted format because it is considered a public bus.

"The downside is that all your existing flat panel monitors and projectors aren't going to work with high-def videos in Vista. Bad news."

Vista's requirements in summary

"In a 32 bit environment, half a gig of RAM is heaps. It's going to fly. For 64 bit you're going to want 2 gigs of DDR3 RAM.

"If you move from 32 to 64 bit, you basically need to at least double your memory. 2 gigs in 64 bit is the equivalent of a gig of RAM on a 32bit machine. That's because you're dealing with chunks that are twice the size? if you try to make do with what you've got you'll see less performance. But RAM is now so cheap, it's hardly an issue.

"In terms of disks, you're really going to want S-ATA 2hard drives with NCQ capability because it gives the OS the ability to get on with stuff while disk tasks complete. All the tier 1 and tier 2 vendors can provide this capability today.

"Thirdly, the graphics card and system bus is essential. PCI x16 is going to be very important. Any of today's 3D GPUs will be fine? we're not waiting for some mystical monster that may or may not come out. But they need to have 128MB of RAM on it. If they've only got 64 don't panic.

"We acknowledge that many corporate notebooks have fairly low-end integrated graphics chips. They're not exactly high performance graphics systems. For those users, we will provide a classic UI that looks like XP, and then we will have Aero that will start to make use of the GPU, and then there's Aero Glass that will demand the higher level.

"We are talking a year out here, so I have no doubt the vendors will address this in that period of time.?