Since the release of Windows 10, Microsoft has received feedback from certain users, to the effect that the O/S doesn’t meet the “demanding needs of mission critical and compute intensive workloads.” It either doesn’t detect, or simply doesn’t use the capabilities of some types of high-performance hardware.

Microsoft’s answer to that feedback is Windows 10 Pro for Workstations, which will become available for testing soon, via the Insider Preview program.

The new version of Windows 10 includes the ReFS filesystem, which is supposed to be much more resilient than the NTFS filesystem used by standard Windows. It also includes support for non-volatile NVDIMM-N memory modules, which provide high-speed access to files. SMB Direct provides a faster file sharing mechanism. There’s also more support for high performance hardware, including server-grade Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron processors, up to four CPUs (regular Windows is limited to two) and memory up to 6TB (regular Windows is limited to 2TB).

High-end system builders, and people running high-performance niche applications may find these features useful, but I suspect that most people won’t be interested, especially as the new version is likely to be rather expensive, as is the related hardware.

There’s no word yet on whether privacy-related instrumentation will be any easier to disable in Windows 10 Pro for Workstations, or whether system administrators will be able to control which updates are installed, or disable auto-update completely.