Microsoft: Future Windows versions will be very different

Future Windows versions will have to be fundamentally different to take advantage of multi-core processors - said Ty Carlson, Microsoft 's chief technical strategist.

" You will find that your client system will have 8, 16, 64 and more chips, " said Ty Carlson at the Future in Review conference. However, at this point, Windows Vista has only been designed to run on 1.2 or 4 chips while four-core chips are gradually being offered to Intel and AMD.

The problem is that current PC applications are often programmed with the ability to handle default strings, so the stronger the chip clock speed the higher the performance of these applications. The chip industry has decided to choose multi-core chips as the best way to increase processing efficiency, and that also means that applications must be designed with the ability to handle parallelism by default.

The two giants Intel and AMD have only recently released the theory of chips on 8 cores, but have not confirmed plans to develop them. Intel demonstrated the 80-core chip, but that was just a research project. However, Carlon said he and other software developers will quickly approach this field.

" In the next 10 to 15 years, we will dramatically increase the power of computer processing. The problem is how to write software, " Carlon predicts.