In my earlier article, I posited that, as multicore PCs evolve and the number of cores increases, the superior scalability of the Windows 7 kernel would eventually overcome Windows XP in terms of raw application throughput. But I had figured this inflection point to be well into the many-core future and suggested we would be lucky to see Windows 7 overtaking XP before 16- or 32-core CPUs were commonplace. It's now clear that my prediction was off by a factor of 3 or 4, and that the point where a combination of multicore hardware and kernel tuning wins out over the simpler, brute-force approach of the XP kernel has already been reached.

Further to this, Morgan's profile also let slip that Microsoft are hoping to form a number of future relationships with major players such as IBM, Intel, AMD and others in the run up to 128-bit support. (Keep in mind that 64-bit computing is just now going mainstream.)

Yes, 128 bits would allow us to have 281,474,976,710,656 yobibytes of memory. 1 yobibyte is 1,024 zebibytes. We would first have to get to tebibytes, then pebibytes, then exbibytes. No, I'm not making this up.

Microsoft's OEM Division Corporate Vice President Steve Guggenheimer during a keynote address at Computex 2009 in Taipei revealed that the company is confident with the progress made with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, and that as a result, Microsoft will deliver Release to Manufacturing (RTM) code to partners in the second half of July. Windows 7 will become generally available on October 22, 2009, and Windows Server 2008 R2 will be broadly available at the same time.

Windows 7, unlike Vista, should be able to run on netbooks, and AMD already has driver support for it for their GPUs.

AMD says all of its CPUs with the exception of its very low-end Sempron and Turion K8 Rev E processors will include AMD-V, the firm's hardware-based virtualisation technology needed to support XP mode.

Now, three years later, it appears to be time for the “Vista Capable” sequel. How much positive Windows 7 buzz will be wiped out in coming weeks and months when consumers and business buyers discover that a heavily hyped new Windows 7 feature, XP Mode, won’t work on some Intel-based products? The problem is caused by the Byzantine way Intel packages its CPU technology—adding, removing, and tweaking features like bus speed and cache size to hit the widest variety of price points for PC makers.