Today, The Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announced the latest roadmap milestone for Vulkan, the cross-platform 3D graphics and compute API. The Vulkan roadmap targets the "immersive graphics" market, made up of mid- to high-end smartphones, tablets, laptops, consoles, and desktop devices. The Vulkan Roadmap 2024 milestone captures a set of capabilities that are expected to be supported in new products for that market, beginning in 2024. The roadmap specification provides a significant increase in functionality for the targeted devices and sets the evolutionary direction of the API, including both new hardware capabilities and improvements to the programming model for Vulkan developers.

Vulkan Roadmap 2024 is the second milestone release on the Vulkan Roadmap. Products that support it must be Vulkan 1.3 conformant and support the extensions and capabilities defined in both the 2022 and 2024 Roadmap specifications. Vulkan roadmap specifications use the Vulkan Profile mechanism to help developers build portable Vulkan applications; roadmap requirements are expressed in machine-readable JSON files, and tooling in the Vulkan SDK auto-generates code that makes it easy for developers to query for and enable profile support in their applications.

Today, we shared our vision for the next era of the Windows PC, where the PC and the cloud intersect and tap into innovative AI technology that unlocks new experiences. So that each of us can participate, be seen, heard and express our creativity.

For nearly 40 years, the Windows PC has held a place at the center of our lives. It's contributed to new levels of productivity, kept us all connected, and unlocked our creativity and potential through innovations we couldn't have imagined when we first began this journey. Just think about how far we've come in how people interact with it. From the very first text-based keyboard input to the precision of point and click with the mouse, up to today, where touch, voice, pen and gestures all help people use the Windows PC more naturally and intuitively. From its inception, Surface has been a catalyst for that change.

Microsoft is today holding a virtual Windows Event to showcase what is next for Windows. As we have made reports earlier in the past few weeks, the Redmond giant has shown-off the next-generation Windows 11 operating system, which will make a major improvement compared to Windows 10 both internally and as far as looks are concerned. We were live-blogging all of that, and at exactly, 11 am Eastern Time. You can find the whole live blog below, and check out the new Windows 11 OS features.

14:43 UTC: The event is about to start...

We knew since a little earlier this month, that Microsoft's next major operating system's launch is scheduled for October, with enterprise/partner availability in August. The Windows Team let out a specific date for availability to consumers: Fri., October 26, 2012. The date was announced by Steven Sinofsky, president of Windows division at Microsoft, at the company's annual sales meeting. The Friday launch allows users to spend the weekend with installations and getting a hang of the new OS.

Very quietly Microsoft has released two new patches available for the Bulldozer platform. According to the AMD blog these patches seem to offer little more then a 10% boost but the do improve over all performance. This is what Adam Kozak a product marketing manager at AMD had to say,

"Some of you may remember that AMD FX processors use a unique dual-core module architecture codenamed "Bulldozer", which current versions of Windows 7 were not specifically architected to utilize. In essence, for those with an AMD FX-8150 Processor, for example, Windows 7 sees the eight available cores and randomly assigns threads to them.

In initial testing of the upcoming Windows 8 operating system, we've seen performance improvements of up to 10% in some applications, when compared to Windows 7. This is because the system correctly recognizes the AMD FX processor architecture and cores. Thanks to close collaboration between Microsoft and AMD, Microsoft recently completed back-porting some of the Windows 8 scheduler code for AMD FX processors into a hotfix for Windows 7."

After showing us working samples of the first six-core "Istanbul" server chips, AMD today hosted some information on its blog regarding the work process on the chips. "The silicon is healthy and we're targeting a launch in 2H09," AMD spokesperson Jake Whitman said Tuesday. "The new 6-core version of the AMD Opteron processor is scheduled to be available in the second half of this year, and it is everything we had hoped for - and more." added John Fruehe from AMD, on his blog.
With the release of "Istanbul" server chips, AMD will try to catch up with Intel and its six-core "Dunnington" processor for servers. The Socket 1207 Istanbul chips will offer an easy upgrade from current 45nm quad-core Shanghai Opterons, while still maintaining the same thermal envelope with even more cores per processor. To watch videos of "Istanbul" in action left click here.

Just under an hour after the public release of the Windows 7 beta was expected to launch, there has been an update on the Windows 7 Blog, as to why the beta has not been made available yet:

Due to very heavy traffic we're seeing as a result of interest in the Windows 7 Beta, we are adding some additional infrastructure support to the Microsoft.com properties before we post the public beta. We want to ensure customers have the best possible experience when downloading the beta, and I'll be posting here again soon once the beta goes live. Stay tuned! We are excited that you are excited!

So far as we know, the beta was scheduled to be released to the public at 12pm PST (Pacific Standard Time) on the official Windows 7 website. For now though, we wait.

Microsoft has launched an MSDN Blog for the Engineering of Windows 7, dubbed E7 for short. The blog, hosted by two Windows 7 senior engineering managers, is aimed to inform "...enthusiasts, bloggers, and those that are the most passionate about Windows... what's in store for the next major release of Windows."

You can check out the blog here

We strongly believe that success for Windows 7 includes an open and honest, and two-way, discussion about how we balance all of these interests and deliver software on the scale of Windows. We promise and will deliver such a dialog with this blog.

We, as a team, definitely learned some lessons about "disclosure" and how we can all too easily get ahead of ourselves in talking about features before our understanding of them is solid. Our intent with Windows 7 and the pre-release communication is to make sure that we have a reasonable degree of confidence in what we talk about when we do talk. Again, top of mind for us is the responsibility we feel to make sure we are not stressing priorities, churning resource allocations, or causing strategic confusion among the tens of thousands of partners and customers who care deeply and have much invested in the evolution of Windows.

Windows 7 is currently scheduled for release in 2010 based on information which we covered here

HEXUS.tv was invited to Bungie and record what's going on there with the shaping up of the multi-player game Halo 3. It's really a shame that it will be exclusively released for the Xbox 360.
Anyway, if you are in the mood of more Halo 3 besides the HEXUS vblog then watch the Multiplayer Vidoc from Bungie.net. Halo 3 will hit your box' harddrive using the Xbox Live service on May 16th.