#Bizwhiznetwork.com Innovation ΛＩ |Technology News
Once upon a time (read: prior to the late 1990s), you had workstation-class hardware and desktop-class hardware, and never the twain shall meet. If you had a workstation, it meant you ran a CPU based on a real ISA, like MIPS, SPARC, or Alpha. In later years, after Wintel buried its non-x86 competitors, it still implied a system meant for professional and business applications, with an emphasis on stability and reliability. The lines between workstations and desktops have been blurring steadily for years, and Microsoft’s latest OS announcement is going to muck the difference up a bit more.
Up until now, we’ve had Windows 10 Home for consumers, Windows 10 Pro for your professional and workstation markets, and Windows 10 Enterprise for the largest volume customers. Now the market is getting a little more crowded, with the seemingly redundant “Windows 10 Pro for Workstations.”
Microsoft’s blog post announcing the new OS version states, “Windows 10 Pro for workstations… comes with unique support for server grade PC hardware and is designed to meet demanding needs of mission critical and compute intensive workloads.” Which features are those, you ask?
Microsoft is bringing support for the ReFS file system to Windows 10 Pro for Workstations. ReFS was originally debuted in Windows Server 2012 and has been positioned as the ‘next’ file system intended to succeed NTFS, though MS has never given a timeline for deploying it to the consumer market. ReFS implements features NTFS lacks that improve error correction, and it’s more resilient against certain types of data corruption as well. There are additional features, but previously MS has differentiated between the versions available in W10 and those it shipped in its server operating systems, and it’s not clear from the blog post if its unifying that effort.
Windows 10 PfW will also support the NVDIMM-N memory standard. NVDIMMs combine NAND flash in the DIMM memory form factor in various ways. NVDIMM-F is the standard for NAND memory that plugs into a DIMM socket and can be used as a much slower (but much larger) pool of memory.
Certain types of databases and other applications that prioritize storing a great deal of information over its raw access latency benefit from this, and using the DIMM socket ensures that access latencies are far quicker (and consistent) than the PCI Express bus offers. NVDIMM-N, in contrast, mounts NAND flash as a backup solution for DRAM. Data is copied from RAM to the NVDIMM, while the system sees the DRAM as standard RAM. MS describes this as letting you “read and write your files with the fastest speed possible, the speed of the computer’s main memory. Because NVDIMM-N is non-volatile memory, your files will still be there, even when you switch your workstation off.”
Windows 10 PfW will also include support for the SMB Direct networking standard and its RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) capability, and it will support systems with up to four physical CPUs, up from just two CPUs today. It will also support up to 6TB of memory, up from 2TB now. Given that even dense server configs top out around 1.5TB of memory per socket, Microsoft is clearly aiming for rarefied air here. The 4S server market was never large — today, a system configured for four AMD Epyc CPUs would sport 128 cores and 256 threads, while Intel offers up to 112 cores/224 threads. Ten years ago, a 4S system of quad-cores would still have offered just 16 CPU cores and the same number of threads, since Intel’s Core 2-derived Xeons never used Hyper-Threading. AMD’s K10 ‘Barcelona’ architecture, which actually wasn’t far from launching a decade ago, didn’t either.
No information on pricing or availability has been announced. Needless to say, there are no consumer upgrade options or announced paths for a Windows 10 Pro user to step up to the Workstation version.
