Last week, Microsoft ended up having to apologize after it managed to accidentally release internal builds of Windows 10 to Windows Insider PCs and mobile devices. While this may have angered some who then had to wait to fix their wrongly updated machines, a few users inevitably took the opportunity to see if the internal builds held any secrets. It turns out they did!
As reported by The Verge, a brand new edition of Windows 10 has been discovered by Twitter users TheGrandMofongo and AndItsTito. This version is called Windows 10 Pro for Workstation, and evidence of the new build comes in the form of two slides describing the expected features.
The slides make it clear that this is a version aimed squarely at power users running server grade hardware. With that in mind, there's support for Microsoft's proprietary file system ReFS, which stands for Resilient File System. It's the replacement file system for NTFS and introduces integrity checking, data scrubbing, protects against data degradation, and boasts built-in handling of hard disk failure and redundancy. All of which sounds like a wishlist for business users and server-focused environments.
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ReFS is also optimized for handling large volumes of data. Microsoft is complimenting that with the inclusion of the SMBDirect protocol, which is a high throughput, low latency and low CPU utilization file-sharing protocol. It means large amounts of data can be shared very quickly across networks, and just as importantly, faster than all existing versions of Windows 10.
Performance away from data is also a focus, so Microsoft is optimizing for "typical compute and graphics intensive workloads." That's useful considering there's also expanded hardware support allowing for up to four CPUs and 6TB of memory per PC. Existing versions of Windows 10 only support a maximum of two CPUs. Microsoft is also promising more advancements in the future and those listed above are just a starting point.
For now, this is just an unconfirmed new version of the OS, but one backed up by some very clear evidence and an announcement is likely imminent. It's unclear if the name will end up being final as the first slide suggests it's placeholder. The name Windows 10 Pro for Advanced PCs is also listed in the build. I suspect Workstation will win out, though.
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