Stefano Demiliani WeBlog

What Hardware for Longhorn?

I've just read an article on FCW.com that talks about expected hardware to run Longhorn final release.

They say that "In the meantime, industry analysts are predicting that Longhorn will need every bit of the power and processing capacity of the average desktop computer in 2006. Some say that could mean a 5 GHz microprocessor, 2G of main memory, a PCI Express bus and a widescreen display. The desktop would also likely need a constant Internet connection.

Microsoft officials have already disclosed that some of Longhorn's new security features and graphics functions will not run on existing hardware. Any agency that chooses to run applications in Longhorn's trusted computing mode will have to buy new hardware with a built-in security chip to reinforce the operating system's security.

An extensive hardware upgrade might also be in store for agencies with PCs lacking 3-D graphics capabilities. Longhorn is expected to introduce screen rendering with vector graphics instead of the bitmap variety that Windows operating systems now use."

Is not too much? What about the future investments that company that want to migrate to it must do? I hope that from here to 2006 MS will work a lot to reduce harware requisites to run this new OS.

Again, a built-in security chip? I hope that MS will work itself to improve the OS security, not entrusts to external hardware improvements (but they are welcome, expecially regarding security in general).

I love the future adoption of vector graphics, it's a significant improvements (but Linux use it from a lot of time), and I (now) don't think that 3D graphics desktop will have a lot of future, I think they could be noise (I hope that you could switch to a standard desktop vision when you want).