It's easy to grow when you're small

You know, Paul, as soon as you bring up Apple, math, and market share we can expect to see around 100 "Paul hates Apple" comments. Oh, well. They are kind of fun to watch. 3...2...1...

Don't worry about it, yert. In the case of Vista 64, the outcome is easy to predict. A few (let's say two or three) years from now, 64 bit will inevitably be the dominant Version. Just wait for the time that more than 4 GB of memory are Standard in Joe Users PC he bought for 300 bucks in his Best Buy around the corner...

I will definitely be going to x64 for Windows 7. I debated with myself to do it for Vista, but decided I did not need it in the end. There going to be many applications and/or games that use more than 4 gigs of ram in the near future. I believe x64 will reach 50% market saturation by SP1 of windows 7.

Ruh Roh...I hate to do this, but I think you just broke cardinal rule by quoting an 'analyst'. :p

"Let's see 64 Bit processors appeared on mainstream desktops, about oh, eight years ago, a couple more years and a MS will have a 64 bit os on its hands that's ready for prime time. Keep pushing the envelope MS." And the desire for most people to have a 64 bit OS, eight years ago was what?

You're right 2003 not 2001 my bad, that being said five f-ing years for ms to fully support 64 bit, my main point stands. MS has never been a technology leader. joe Dokes

Gee, joe, you really should read the whole post. Microsoft had 64-bit XP out before the Athlon-64 shipped. And 64-bit OS out for years before that for other architectures you probably didn't buy. How much more do you want from them? Telepathy?

WOW!!! Papola limited his verbal diarrhea to one paragraph. It's a bloody miracle.

@Weedmonk, Do you really want us to get on this merry-go-round again? Paul is a flamebaiter here. He just keeps ringing the same bell and I'm tired of making the same (correct) rebuttals. He's entitled to have no clue how to analyze market information. It's the reason nobody really pays attention to his commentary outside this site's active community. "won't translate into significant market share gains" - we all know Apple's made significant gains in consumer share, so that statement is just a lie Paul keeps repeating. Whatever. Someone said the definition of insanity is repeating the same thing again and again and expecting a different outcome. Paul's a lost cause, and I don't feel like acting insane. Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

When I saw the post's title I was looking forward to see Paul's explanation of this long held theory. And what do we get? "I've repeatedly mentioned ... snip...that Apple's phenomenal year-over-year quarterly growth in Mac sales won't translate into significant market share gains." Absolutely right. But how does that explain how easy it is grow when you are small? Answer: It doesn't Then we get the HP vs Apple comparison. Why not just use the real figures Paul, In the last quarter the whole PC industry grew by 16% HP grew at 17%. Just 1% better. Apple grew at 41%. That would be.... er .... 24% better. " It’s simple math" Yes but nobody here has told me why it's so "easy".

Whats the advantage of 64-bit Windows vs. 32-bit Windows?

@Ocean, the OS can access more than 4gigs of RAM, or between 3-3.5 gig is what you see most of the time with a system with XP or Vista 32bit on a system with 4gig. I am sure someone will come hear and tell you its faster at times. Which could be true but I bet it depends on the app, and most of the time only a bench mark would tell you its faster. I have read more than a few comparisons and they are mixed. Some cases faster, some no difference, some actually slower. I would say its useful for about 2% of applications. That said 64bit is the future and MS should have just dumped 32 bit...hopefully Vista R2 or umm Windows 7 will be only 64bit.

Snake Dumping 32-bit at this time would be foolish. You're already saying it only benefits 2% of applications (I'm assuming that's just a wild guess but let's go with it for now). You're saying that it would be a good idea to sacrifice backward compatibility and incur transition inefficiencies for 98% of the apps to benefit 2% which can already get that benefit by those users going 64-bit. (Personally, I think the apps that benefit is more than 2% but that's also a guess) There is an inherent cost to running 32-bit apps in a 64-bit OS in the same way that there was in running 16-bit apps in a 32-bit OS. That cost is offset in many ways but whether it will or won't be better overall right now depends on the mix of apps and the system. Additionally, Microsoft cares about backward compatibility. To break with no transitional period would require that older hardware would be stuck in the older systems without the other benefits of an updated OS. Since 64-bit has been available on Microsoft client operating systems since Windows XP, the choice of 32-bit or 64-bit is now up to the system builder and the consumer. To my mind a much better choice than dictating a mandatory transition and leaving users out in the cold. Now, on the server side, you've already seen server apps that have gone 64-bit only. In those dedicated use machines which already push the hardware, it makes more sense since the benefits to that one app are solidly known.

runner There's no question that 64-bit is taking off. When it will pass 32-bit on new systems is still up for speculation but I'd say we'll see it within the year. Now, that won't mean that the market share of 64-bit will pass 32-bit because of all that existing 32-bit Vista and 32-bit XP out there but those systems will age out in the next few years and we'll certainly see no more need for a 32-bit client OS in a few years in the same way that we no longer saw 16-bit client OS sales several years after 32-bit platforms came online. In fact, more likely the transition wil be faster since the architectural changes are less major since the Windows NT architecture wasn't tied to a single architecture the way that Windows 3.x and 9x were.

Mike, Yeah, It really surprised me though how many in the ad were 64-bit. Hopefully the consumers never know they are running 64 bit and the transition is almost transparent to them. All they need to know is that "Wow I have 5 gigs of RAM" That would be the goal wouldn't it. Most people I know dont even know what version of windows they are using. I think it will be decently smooth but time will tell, of course. One other thing. I've sorta been wondering for the last couple days. How well do 64 bit Vista/linux etc. run on the first generation of 64 bit processors(athlon 64, pentium 4 64 bit models)

Maybe "Easy to grow" is the wrong phrase...how about if I were to say "A company with fewer customers can post a higher percentage growth by selling fewer of a given product than a company with more customers"? Would that make it more accurate? I believe that is what Paul is trying to say...he is just saying it badly. I am pretty sure that all of you that have been harping on this know that already, though. Paul - can you tell us all if I am going in the right direction here? It seems that many of your readers are waiting to hear from you on this. --tayme

Snake The multicore/manycore issue is actually a bigger one than the 64 vs 32 bit one. Vista (like any modern Windows) will allocate threads across the different cores as needed to balance the load. That's not the problem. It's rare that you'll see one core in a dual core sitting idle while the other chugs along under load. Even if an old single-threaded app is hogging one core, all the system processes and background threads from the OS will be migrated to the other core. The problem is that writing apps that take advantage of multiple cores efficiently is a hard problem and one that very few programmers know how to do well. And I mean very few. I'd be surprised if 10% of the programmers working in the industry today could write really good multithreaded code. And this is a huge problem facing the industry. Since we've peaked at processor speed we're seeing the push for faster systems being answered by multi core systems. When I was scanning the mainstream computers today in response to this thread I not only noticed a lot of 64-bit Vista, I also noticed a lot of quad-core processor systems. That's becoming mainstream. And next year, I'd be surprised if the average home system sold had less than 8 cores. Writing an app to deal with not only threading but processor affinity and stalling and race conditions is hard. I know both Microsoft and Apple are working hard on tools to make this easier (Microsoft has some in beta now) but it'll be a while before it's either easy enough for the average professional programmer as they are today or for the average programmer to gain the needed skills. And many major applications have not been architected to make transparent multithreading something that wil be easy to do without redesigning the app from the ground up. At any rate, that's the crisis that's really looming. Oh, and one more note. I've seen people criticize an application for running almost entirely on one core rather than loading down all the cores on their system. They thought this was inherently a bad thing. It isn't. Splitting the work is often best done by keeping everything on one core. The overhead of synchronization or cache invalidation can make splitting into to many threads as bad a thing and not splitting them enough. Some problems break up well, some not that well, some not at all.

Ocean OT: Why don't you go and put it on one of the existing Windows "Mojave" threads where it belongs rather than attempt to hijack an unrelated thread? Since we'll assume you'll do that, we can ignore it here and keep it in context.

"Someone said the definition of insanity is repeating the same thing again and again and expecting a different outcome. Paul's a lost cause, and I don't feel like acting insane." What's truly ironic is that he thinks he's "bringing some sort of balance into the media", which, through his glasses, is so "pro-Apple and anti-MS". So what does he do? He decides to compare the adoption rate of Vista with that of Mac OS X, because Mac is small and Vista, when it came out, was "small". Vista, of course, has had a market share of nearly 100% of the pc market the day it came out because pc's just happen come with Windows preinstalled, so calling it "small" market-wise at any point in history makes this probably the stupidest thing I've ever read. To me it's all quite entertaining, but don't any of you winfans feel the least bit embarrassed reading this stuff?

John Papola, the fact that you proffer that all of your rebuttals are correct illustrates your arrogant buffonery. The answer is simple, go elsewhere if you don't like what is written.

“The problem is that writing apps that take advantage of multiple cores efficiently is a hard problem and one that very few programmers know how to do well. And I mean very few. I'd be surprised if 10% of the programmers working in the industry today could write really good multithreaded code. And this is a huge problem facing the industry. Since we've peaked at processor speed we're seeing the push for faster systems being answered by multi core systems. When I was scanning the mainstream computers today in response to this thread I not only noticed a lot of 64-bit Vista, I also noticed a lot of quad-core processor systems. That's becoming mainstream. And next year, I'd be surprised if the average home system sold had less than 8 cores. Writing an app to deal with not only threading but processor affinity and stalling and race conditions is hard.” Overall, what an intelligent post (except the 8-core comment for next year; I don’t think quad is mainstream yet, so maybe it will become so next year, I think even 8 logical units is pushing it for mainstream yet – quad+HT – and I think 8-core mainstream is 2-3 years away at best). It’s funny how many “commentators” (read: dumb hack bloggers; read: Robin Harris - http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=334) get it oh so very wrong. He has no clue that OS can already load up the cores, and thinks you can take inherently unparallel code and somehow spread it over the cores at runtime efficiently. I wish you would post there, so that the [idiot] (I apologize for the rude treatment of the said individual, but I actually asked him to define what the heck he was talking about and he still couldn’t) does some research. And here’s the kicker. Wouldn’t you agree that a lot of common computing tasks do not thread well and forcing threading may actually incur you a performance penalty?

@Ocean - Keep in mind, that those old Folgers, and even the new Pizza Hut pasta adverts were and have been successful. Along with that MS has stated that this is not even a part of the advertising campaign that they have planned. Even if it is, it is just as valid as Apple touting their own product, not be demonstrating it, but by "poking fun" at its competition. See my post in the thread regarding Mojave and you will see that it is possible to get a thorough "test drive" of Vista at no cost, for up to 120 days. --tayme

tayme It's interesting to note that the "Pepsi Challenge" ads were done by John Sculley who was later hand picked by Steve Jobs to run Apple. Sculley quadrupled Pepsi's ad budget and took Pepsi from being the number two cola brand to being the number two cola brand. :-) It's interesting that, at least according to a widely circulated anecdote, when Scully took the test, he preferred Coke.

ibarskiy Wow. I just read that article and don't even know where to begin. It takes real talent for a supposed professional to take multiple press releases from multiple sources for technology he doesn't begin to understand and first off have the nerve to think he should editorialize on it and second to get virtually every sentence wrong. You'd think he'd have learned at least a little about the subject after reading those press releases. btw: you might want to take a look at Microsoft's TPL (Task Parallel Library) and PLINQ (Parallel Language INtegrated Query) technologies. They're still in pretty early beta but they've done some fascinating work on parallelization for devs not in that very top tier who can do thread sync well on their own.

On point worth mentioning if you feel like annoying people on the ZD thread would be this comparison since designing for a few cores doesn't really cover all you need to learn to do dozens: Largest commercial OS X multiprocessor machines 2 sockets for a total of 8 cores Largest commercial Windows multiprocessor machines 64 sockets - HP Integrity SuperDome series (32 socket servers aren't unusual) And to add another data point into the mix although the loosly coupled HPC model really solves different multicore issues than things like TPL/PLINQ or Robotics Developer Studio... Largest Windows Server 2008 HPC Cluster 9,600 cores - NCSA "Abe" supercomputer (currently ranked as the 23rd fastest supercomputer in the world and running on a beta release of commercially available Windows HPC software)