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One time upon a time (read: prior to the tardily 1990s), you had workstation-class hardware and desktop-form 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 Blastoff. In afterwards years, afterwards Wintel buried its non-x86 competitors, it all the same unsaid a system meant for professional person and business applications, with an emphasis on stability and reliability. The lines betwixt 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 than.

Upward until now, we've had Windows 10 Abode for consumers, Windows x Pro for your professional and workstation markets, and Windows ten Enterprise for the largest volume customers. At present the marketplace 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 class PC hardware and is designed to meet demanding needs of mission critical and compute intensive workloads." Which features are those, you ask?

W10ProforW

Microsoft is bringing support for the ReFS file system to Windows 10 Pro for Workstations. ReFS was originally debuted in Windows Server 2022 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 meliorate error correction, and it'southward more than resilient against certain types of data abuse as well. There are additional features, simply previously MS has differentiated between the versions bachelor in W10 and those it shipped in its server operating systems, and it's not clear from the blog mail if its unifying that endeavour.

Windows 10 PfW will also support the NVDIMM-North memory standard. NVDIMMs combine NAND wink in the DIMM retention form factor in various ways. NVDIMM-F is the standard for NAND retentiveness that plugs into a DIMM socket and tin be used every bit a much slower (only much larger) pool of memory.

Certain types of databases and other applications that prioritize storing a corking deal of information over its raw access latency benefit from this, and using the DIMM socket ensures that admission 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 every bit standard RAM. MS describes this as letting you "read and write your files with the fastest speed possible, the speed of the calculator's main memory. Because NVDIMM-Due north is non-volatile memory, your files will still be there, even when you switch your workstation off."

Windows 10 PfW will too include support for the SMB Direct networking standard and its RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) capability, and it will support systems with upwardly to iv concrete CPUs, upward from only ii CPUs today. Information technology will also support up to 6TB of memory, up from 2TB now. Given that fifty-fifty dumbo server configs top out effectually ane.5TB of memory per socket, Microsoft is clearly aiming for rarefied air here. The 4S server market place was never big — 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. 10 years agone, a 4S system of quad-cores would still have offered just 16 CPU cores and the same number of threads, since Intel'south Cadre 2-derived Xeons never used Hyper-Threading. AMD's K10 'Barcelona' architecture, which actually wasn't far from launching a decade agone, didn't either.

No information on pricing or availability has been appear. Needless to say, in that location are no consumer upgrade options or appear paths for a Windows ten Pro user to footstep upwards to the Workstation version.