Microsoft reveals Windows 10 Pro for Workstations aimed at powerful PCs

Windows 10 Pro for Workstations has been officially announced by Microsoft, the previously leaked new spin on the desktop OS which comes with support for seriously beefy workstation PC hardware.

The new version of Windows 10 will be made available alongside the Fall Creators Update, and it will support Intel Xeon or AMD Opteron processors, and up to four CPUs (as opposed to the current limit of two). Memory configurations will be supported up to a mammoth 6TB as well, an increase from the current limit of 2TB.

All this is exactly as previous speculation indicated, as is the operating system’s move to a new resilient file system, ReFS, which is optimized for handling massive volumes of data, and designed with fault tolerance and resilience to data corruption firmly in mind.

Memory matters

Other juicy additions include support for persistent memory: NVDIMM-N modules will allow for lightning fast reads/writes to satisfy demanding apps. And a new feature by the name of SMB Direct will facilitate much faster file-sharing over the network (and these activities will exert a lighter load on the processor, too).

In a blog post, Microsoft said that the new OS offers “support for server grade PC hardware and is designed to meet demanding needs of mission critical and compute intensive workloads”.

There’s been no mention thus far concerning how Microsoft will pitch the pricing for Windows 10 Pro for Workstations.

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).