What does 128-bit OS mean to a software developer?

Question

Microsoft is planning to make Windows 8 an 128-bit operating system.

I have always used 32-bit machines. I know 64-bit are common as well but I never went into details to understand how does it help a developer or in general. So my question is - What does 128-bit OS mean to a software developer?

UPDATE

I asked about this in general. It doesn't matter if it is a hoax or whatever.

Answer 1

It means that the Windows\System32 directory contains 128bit DLLs, 64bit DLLs in WINDOWS\SysWOW128, and 32bit DLLs are in WINDOWS\SysWOW64WOW128.

In the registry, 128bit applications store data under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE, 64bit applications under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Wow12864Node, and 32bit applications under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Wow1286432Node.

This strategy will confuse virus and malware developers so much that they give up. Registered developers will receive a large poster to illustrate the redirects and mappings.

Answer 2

First, it depends on whether there would be only 128-bits data registers or address registers to.

First variant means only problems for programs exploiting shifts and overflows.

Second variant means that problems abusing address arithmetics will suffer too.

BUT: personally, I think if this message is not complete BS, this will more probably mean that MS tries to make its kernel more hardware agnostic to support existing 32-bit and 64-bit architectures (ARM comes to mind), not some non-existant 128-bit architecture.

They did it before targeting i860 during development Windows NT. Resulting hardware abstraction layer allown them to support x86, MIPS, Alpha etc.