The forecast has been put forward that the next version of Windows will be fundamentally different when contrasted to the current platforms from Microsoft. Ty Carlson, Microsoft Director of Technical Strategy underlined the fact that the evolution of the Windows operating system will be intimately connected with the growth of multicore processors. Microsoft will simply have to keep up the pace with the computing ecosystem with Windows. Unlike Windows Vista, which will support up to four processors, the forthcoming versions of the Windows platform will have to be centered around system architectures with 64 processors and beyond. This will become a standard of computing technology for client machines in the next 10 to 15 years.

In this context, future releases of Windows will be designed to accommodate multicore processors. This however could imply a divorce between Microsoft and the current core of the Windows operating system. Parallel computing could end up killing Windows as we know it. Microsoft is already one step ahead, and is getting ready to reinvent computing.

"The many-core inflection point presents a new challenge for our industry, namely general-purpose parallel computing. Unless this challenge is met, the continued growth and importance of computing itself and of the businesses engaged in it are at risk. We must make parallel programming easier and more generally applicable than it is now, and build hardware and software that will execute arbitrary parallel programs on whatever scale of system the user has," reads a fragment of the synopsis associated with a presentation that will be delivered by Burton Smith from Microsoft Research entitled Reinventing Computing at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2007 on July 16, 2007.

The move to parallel computing will have to be followed by parallel computing, and this will mean that the existing Windows architecture will be discarded. And chancing Windows is equivalent with a move that will reverberate throughout the whole software industry. The impact of parallel computing will create waves beyond any Richter scale.

"The changes needed to accomplish this are significant and affect computer architecture, the entire software development tool chain, and the army of application developers that will rely on those tools to develop parallel applications. This talk will point out a few of the hard problems that face us and some prospects for addressing them," promises the remaining fragment of Smith's synopsis.