Windows 10 Pro for Workstations officially announced

Microsoft reveals another new feature in the Fall Creators' Update

Microsoft has announced a special edition of Windows 10 aimed at high-end machines.

Windows 10 Pro for Workstations was first revealed in a rather shonky build that was accidentally released along with some slides, back in June.

Now, Microsoft has made it official. The new version will have ‘unique support' for ‘server grade PC hardware' and is specifically designed for ‘critical and compute intensive workloads'.

The announcement says, "Performance is a very important requirement in this new world of fast paced innovation and we will continue to invest on Windows 10 Pro for Workstations to enable Windows power users to maximise every aspect of their high-performance device. Windows 10 Pro for Workstations utilises significant investments, that Windows has made in recent releases, for scaling up across a high number of logical processors and large amounts of memory."

The new edition will be available starting with the Fall Creators' Update (which, what with one thing and another is turning into a fairly spectacular proposition), and will include:

• ReFS aka Resilient File System. This is the successor to NTFS and will offer a more robust way of filing cloud critical data, missing data corruption, auto-correcting errors and other fail-safes that can beset large data sets.

Put simply, it can dynamically switch to a mirror and simultaneously use it to correct borked data if it finds a problem.

• Persistent memory. This is aimed at NVDIMM-N enabled hardware and will allow them to be accessed at the fastest possible speed. Data on NVDIMM-N will even be available when the host machine is off.
• SMB Direct. This is a faster file sharing offering across your enterprise network. It uses Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) network adapters to produce high speeds and low latencies and thus increase throughput without hogging the CPU.

Finally, a wider range of hardware will be supported, including server grade Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron processors with up to 4 CPUs. That's double the current number. Additionally, RAM can now be installed in three times the quantity - 6TB per machine.