Leak reveals Microsoft plans to revive ‘Workstation’ version of Windows
It seems Microsoft are jumping on the fashion for all things retro by reviving a Workstation version of Windows 10 according to this leak revealed on twitter.
After Microsoft accidentally released a botched internal build of Windows to beta testers, it put out an announcement on its blog to apologise for the mistake but those who received those botched builds received internal info from Microsoft which gave an indication that the new versions of Windows are on there way.
It has been quite a while since the last version of Windows for Workstation was released, that being Windows NT 4 workstation which came out at the same time as Windows 98 which was still running on top of old the DOS code base. NT 4 Workstation was available not only in x86 versions but also could be installed on DEC Alpha and Power PC machines as well so was not really suitable for the home market. Since then Microsoft have called their business oriented versions of Windows, Windows Professional but dropped the support for none x86 processors (although this is likely to change with the launch of Windows 10 for Arm)
Although the Workstation name is currently only an internal name and could well change before release the new version which is aimed at high end PCs with 4 or more physical CPU’s where as current versions of Windows 10 only support 2 physical processors. It will also up the RAM support from 2TB to a massive 6TB.
Another new feature in this Windows Workstation version will be full support of ReFS which is designed to replace NTFS which has been knocking about since the 1990s. This new filesystem has better fault tolerance, support larger volumes and have auto correcting features. Workstation will also support SMBdirect which can offload some of the CPU load to the network card when sending large files across a network.
It is doubtful whether this Workstation version will sell in large numbers due to the limited market so expect Microsoft to be charging a premium for it when it is eventually released