Giving credit where credit is due, Microsoft has been extremely transparent about its upcoming Windows 8 platform and has been using its Building Windows 8 blog to inform the community about the upcoming changes to the Windows platform.
On that note, Microsoft has penned up a new post about reducing runtime memory in Windows 8. The blog states:
Fundamentals such as memory usage represent a key engineering tenet of Windows 8. In building Windows 8 we set out to significantly reduce the overall runtime memory requirements of the core system. This is always good for everyone and especially in a world where people want to run more and more apps at the same time or run on systems with only 1 or 2GB of memory.
The post talks about how having more RAM in a machine actually reduces battery life of a notebook or tablet; Microsoft says that RAM is constantly consuming power. The more RAM a machine is required to have, the more power it needs, which results in shorter battery life. Thus, the goal is to build machines that don’t need several gigabytes of RAM to help improve battery life performance.
A goal for Microsoft is to have the same system requirements as Windows 7. They state on their blog, “Our goal with Windows 8 from the beginning was to ship with the same system requirements as Windows 7”. They go even further to state that they are on track to meeting this goal.