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Microsoft unveiled a beefier version of Windows CE during a keynote at its annual Mobile & Embedded Developers Conference in Las Vegas on May 9.
Windows CE 6 offers a higher capacity for complex applications, fueling “more intelligent devices that offer advanced multimedia and Web services, and wireless networking,” the company claims.
The upgrade sports a redesigned kernel that implements a significant increase in the number of simultaneous application processes, along with increased per-process virtual memory addressability.
Mukund Ghangurde, Microsofts Group Product Manager for Windows Embedded, told WindowsForDevices that the “redesigned kernel” expands the number of simultaneous processes from 32 to 32,000, while enlarging the virtual memory that is addressable by each process from 64MB to 2GB.
Despite the added functionality, “the footprint of the kernel is pretty much the same as what it was before,” Ghangurde said.
“The [Windows CE 5.0] kernel is about 300KB in size, and our development team assures us that [the Windows CE 6 kernel] is going to be pretty much in that same ballpark,” he added.
“Clearly we dont know yet, because theres still development work being done, but our objective is to be very close to that. We realize that for our customers, footprint is very important.”