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Windows 7 Benchmarks Show Little Improvement On Vista
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy examines Windows 7 from the kernel up, subjecting the 'pre-beta' to a battery of benchmarks to find any signs that the OS will be faster, more responsive, and less resource-intensive than the bloated Vista, as Microsoft suggests. Identical thread counts at the kernel level suggest to Kennedy that Windows 7 is a 'minor point-type of release, as opposed to a major update or rewrite.' Memory footprint for the kernel proved eerily similar to that of Vista as well. 'In fact, as I worked my way through the process lists of the two operating systems, I was struck by the extent of the similarities,' Kennedy writes, before discussing the results of a nine-way workload test scenario he performed on Windows 7 — the same scenario that showed Vista was 40 percent slower than Windows XP. 'In a nutshell, Windows 7 M3 is a virtual twin of Vista when it comes to performance,' Kennedy concludes. 'In other words, Microsoft's follow-up to its most unpopular OS release since Windows Me threatens to deliver zero measurable performance benefits while introducing new and potentially crippling compatibility issues.'"
not only is it a dupe, but the original article is still on the front page. Way to go.
Windows 7 is just a rehash of a just released OS, and this article is a rehash of a just released article. There's so much synchronicity, Sting is singing in the background.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
What exactly is this article trying to prove?
Microsoft themselves have said that Windows 7 will ship will the same underlying infrastructure as Windows Vista. They also said that Windows Vista was the biggest kernel rewrite since Windows 2000.
The interesting thing about a lot of Vista's bloat is that it isn't kernel level. We know this since we can compare Windows 2003 and Vista. Windows 2003 has almost identical program startup times to Windows XP/2000.
I do think that Windows 7 is going in a disappointing direction in general. They seem to be playing right into what I like to call the "Apple Trap." Instead of doing what Microsoft do best which is to produce a workhorse they instead try and play the designer, and want to make a work of art.
I have no problems with benchmarking the O/S and commenting on performance and the like, but when the person that analyzes and presents these results says: "the process lists are similar" I'm forced to wonder what the guy is smoking. OK, so you have have smss.exe, csrss.exe, winlogon.exe, a bunch of svchost.exe processes. That really says nothing about the underlying architecture of the operating system and the amount of differences that are there. This guy might as well have said "I looked at Word '97 and Word 2007 and they're both named 'winword.exe' and let you edit text. I'm struck by those similarities!" Anyone expecting Windows 7 to be a radical departure from Windows Vista is delusional, all the more so if that expectation involved vastly different process lists. Also, this guy compares the video encoding performance of Vista and Windows 7 and says there's no performance improvements... That has got to the dumbest thing I have ever heard. Seriously. It might very well be that Windows 7 is as slow as Vista. Maybe it's even slower. But you will never know that by comparing how long video encoding takes on each of them. Video encoding is a CPU-bound process, so nothing Windows 7 does can improve the video encoding performance of any machine because it cannot just magically improve your CPUs clock speed. All other things being equal, any gains from encoding german scheisse porn on Windows 7 over doing so on Windows Vista are going to be negligible at best.
*cofff* Ubuntu 8.10 *cofff*
So we're skipping this one as well?
One of the biggest PR failures of Vista was serious compatability issues with old software and hardware. (I'm going to blame the soft/hardware makers for this. Everyone had 5 years to collect an arsenal of XP gear so I don't think they cried themselves to sleep that we had to buy new Vista Compatible printers just because they couldn't be bothered fixing the drivers.) MS have decided to base Win7 almost entirely around the existing Vista kernel to avoid this, hence the identical performance. "[I]ntroducing new and potentially crippling compatibility issues" would be more likely if MS had decided to chase performance improvements in Win7, unless they based Win7 around the old XP kernel (which ain't happening in their new one-kernel-to-rule-them-all approach).
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Maybe they've decided to finally release that Windows Mojave I've heard so many good things about!
Some facts:
- Vista is barely slower than XP on hardware bought within the last 2 years. It was fairly slower on RTM for many reasons, but vastly improved drivers & some colossal patches have put that to bed now.
- Vista in fact speeds up some operations over XP by pre-caching commonly used stuff. This uses more memory, and is often confused for being "bloated" by actually using the memory that you blessed your computer with being able to use, for what in fact it was designed for - speed increase.
- Windows 7 is taking Vista and putting it on a diet while not fundamentally changing the architecture. If it works on Vista it'll work on W7. That's a stated design goal.
Thus, for performance: Expect Windows 7 to be more responsive to user-input, work on lower-ended machines, start up quicker, etc. Don't expect: CPU intensive apps (games for example) to suddenly speed up 50%; memory intensive apps to use any less memory. They won't - Windows 7 is an operating system, not an overclockers kit.
throw new NoSignatureException();
He said "better" not "more".
Quality not quantity, sadly.
I love Linux, it's good for work, good for application and data servers, but for me, there is a problem.
I am a gamer and I like trying out new hardware. Both of these always pose problems under Linux.
Good stable drivers take time, and require the support of hardware vendors.
Sadly, this means I still have to own and use a copy of Windows XP or give up on games and toys. Ain't gonna happen!
Please just stop following every step of "Windows 7" which will probably not be out for years, despite anything Microsoft says.
The only thing those reports generate is the hype Microsofts wants around their unreleased OS to keep up hope in people dissatisfied by Vista. Yeah, this time it's all going to be better...sure.
Windows 7 is not special and it's not worth reporting every tidbit unless there's actually a product or a set-in-stone feature list.
This explains nicely - http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1707
Short answer: mostly.
throw new NoSignatureException();
The current release isn't a release candidate. It's not a beta. It's a PRE-beta. Microsoft have about at least 10 more months until they call Windows 7 done.
Steven Sinofsky specifically said in his PDC 2008 keynote: "please don't consider this build suitable for benchmarks", but does anyone listen? Nah, let's run the benchmarks! :)
If it works on Vista it'll work on W7.
So, in essence, Windows 7 represents a significant name change from Vista.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I've used XP (feels like I've used it forever), Vista (even longer), and Ubuntu (since 6.04).
In Ubuntu I rarely had any hardware problems. Ubuntu 8.10 recognizes all hardware without ANY problem. In Windows (same hardware!), I have to install at least 5 different hardware drivers. Mind you that this was not on cheap or obscure hardware.
The way I see the hardware issue is: a fresh Windows installation needs half a dozen drivers to be installed manually by the user. Finding drivers is usually pretty easy, especially for newer hardware. In Linux, you have two scenarios:
1. It Just Works (TM).
2. You have driver issues: in this case, you're better of having problems with older hardware that is more likely to be supported by some third party driver.
Office software: OpenOffice.org? It fits my needs (but I do not use it in a professional context so YMMV)
Games: agreed, this is Windows turf.
General acceptance: someday... (one can hope)
"Don't expect: CPU intensive apps (games for example) to suddenly speed up 50%;"
Indeed , 50% is absurd. But they might speed up 5% or so depending on whether the process schedular and memory management have had a rewrite. For a machine with a lot of processes running and an app using a lot of memory those page and cache miss percentage can make a noticable difference as well as how intellgently the OS swaps in and out processes of varying priorities.
Microsoft's obsession with backward compatibility is killing it.
For home and gaming, they need to keep XP and disable it from being used in a business network... let that horse run as far as it can.
For business and other work, they need to write a brand new kernel and everything and start over learning from all previous mistakes and discarding backward compatibility... natively. Then build a VM compatibility layer with the intent that people will use it in the process of weaning themselves from Win32 and all that backward compatibility and supporting broken applications nonsense.
Been saying this for a long time and will keep saying it. I said this before Mac OS X was announced. Apple, it would seem, had the same idea and it is working VERY well for them. The compatibility VM sucked bad which actually prompted people to upgrade their apps even faster. And no one stopped using Apple over it. And no one stopped developing software for Apple computers over it. It was a burden on users and developers to make that change, but in the end it was the best move.
Microsoft is another story. When you are in control of everything, that is precisely what you stand to lose. But ultimately, I see things are coming to a head and Apple sees it too. No matter what Microsoft does, they will lose. They need to make plans to limit their loses and plan for the future -- not just two years of profit forecasting.
The very interesting thing about OS X 10.5 (Leopard) boot process is: It does nothing in order. It is parallel booting, firing all OS startup stuff at once and expects to do their jobs. That happens thanks to launchd architecture which I have no clue why not adopted by Linux or *BSD.
Here is its presentation by the inventor of launchd
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1781045834610400422
(in 8:00")
That is one of underrated features/changes of Leopard. Now the term "photocopy" comes from this: They do something like launchd without using the underlying Unix logic and architecture. So, there is a huge chance that it won't be scaled. I have really lost count of how many kernel extensions, startup items, daemons running on my Leopard but it boots exactly same speed as it was cleanly installed for first time. Just like I really don't care about 1000+ .plist (pref) files on my user directory.
They named it "parallel booting" or something, some story about it on http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9119230&intsrc=hm_list
"Come on guys, its a pre-beta! ... did you really expect them to actually do any thing significant so far?"
Yes. I pulled some facts off the Wiki but I think they are pretty accurate.
Windows Vista RTM: November 8, 2006.
Microsoft stated in 2007 that it is "scoping Windows 7 development to a three-year timeframe"
Release dates are supposed to be in the region of 2009 or 2010.
So, to me, that says that it's *at least* eighteen-months, two-years into development (or thereabouts). It's got another year to eighteen months to go. So, halfway through it's development process, we have *zip* that is actually useful to the average user (which is who it is supposedly aimed at) and nothing to entice business users. There are *no* performance improvements. None. Programmers don't magically add 50% performance after-the-fact, it's *design* that gives you performance.
Halfway through and we don't have a single groundbreaking feature. Nothing. Not even something to show off temporarily. Seriously, read through the Wiki page on "new features in Windows 7" and have a look at the features that are actually *HERE*, not the ones "promised"... remember, Windows Vista was going to have WinFS etc. It's completely embarassing. Instead of a "new operating system", we just have:
Vista, with no better performance, some unnecessary UI changes (purely to make gullible people pay to "retrain" on the new OS in my opinion), removal of lots of built-in applications, a "Health Centre", some claims about fantastic new features that this article proves aren't even in there yet (better performance, threading, etc.) or that only a handful of people in the world could get excited about.
What that tells me is that all these marvellous new features DO NOT EXIST in a reliable form. But I'd be showing them everywhere if they did just work, even only on one machine - I'd be booting it up in conferences, showing it in trade shows, making people WANT that feature that I haven't finished yet and which only works on 25% of machines while the programmers hack on it. But there's *nothing*.
Fortunately, I saw the Vista thing coming.
I had a job interview the other day where the main technically-literate person on the panel asked my opinion on Vista. Needless to say, I was wary of giving my reply in case it was interpreted as belligerent or dismissive, but the interviewer and I laughed and joked and told Vista anecdotes for about ten minutes *in the interview* once he realised that I shared his very-low opinion of the OS. (I got the job, by the way.) I'm pretty sure, at this point, that Windows 7 will be more of the same or worse. Promises, promises, promises and then sting the customer before they realise that they've bought a turkey and that actually it was only useful for the little sticker with the Product Key on it that lets you use its predecessor instead.
(especially given that OpenOffice is at least as good as MS Word)
Afraid I've got to interject here. I'm in the early stages of writing a dissertation, and OOo3 Writer just does not have the same feature set as even Word 2003 (which I'm using for it, under wine) for serious document composure.
I use Linux and have done for years, as my only OS, and I've used and support OOo and have done for years. I can't comment on the other portions of either office suite, because I've never put them to serious work. But, having spent a few hours really teaching myself Word 2003, then trying to see where the same functionality was in Writer, it became apparent that some of it just wasn't there.
It's a shame, but until OOo Writer gets (for example) something akin to Outline mode, it's just not able to match Word for advanced features. That said, OOo is very solid software, and will get there with regards to said features sooner or later I'm sure. Some may even say I'm using the wrong tool for the job.
I couldn't agree more.
Linux is a great O/S and makes wonderful servers but as a desktop it just doesn't have the software. I earn my living using Photoshop, Cubase, Sound Forge and CD Architect.
I really couldn't care less what O/S my desktop runs just as long as I can get my work done. Sadly the Linux equivalents don't yet cut the mustard so I too am stuck with XP.
Linux is a great operating system which is only missing professional desktop applications.
In my generation, people used TeX and troff and thanked their lucky stars that they didn't have to type their PhD dissertations on a type-writer.
My honors project report was submitted in long-hand.
I recently tried Vista (for the second time) because so many monkeys like you keep telling us Vista is much, much better now.
What a bunch of hooey. Vista still makes my (pretty nice) laptop run like a dog. From slow video, to audio stuttering, to far too much hard drive thrashing, to disappointing program startup times...hell, sometimes I can't even track my mouse across the screen without it pausing half way while Vista does God knows what.
And yes, my laptop is "Vista compatible", and yes, I had all the correct drivers installed for my hardware.
I went back to XP (again) and the performance is so much improved, it's like getting a new computer.
Sorry, buddy, but Vista still sucks, despite your claims otherwise. And if Windows 7 is more of the same, I'm going to have to tell Microsoft, "Thanks, but no thanks."
There are loads and loads of scientists/students who still prefer [La]TeX to a graphical word processor any day. There's something about expressing your ideas straight away in a fast and light editor, and producing professional quality documents without any graphical tweaks, rather than wasting memory and processing power for a glorified Paint while praying it not to crash.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Linux is like the Mooncup: a nice idea, but messy and not for the squeamish. In fact, Linux can be likened to a Mooncup-using redhaired hippie girlfriend who lives in a house in the country she built herself from twigs and has very strong ideas on how everything should be and has all her original body hair. The sex is fantastic, but only if she thinks the astrological conditions are perfect. And the house has a hand-dug latrine, so she's propped a toilet bowl on top and thinks that's "user friendliness."
Windows, however, is like a nice normal bottle-blonde girlfriend who has a proper office job and dresses cleanly from Primark and has a sweet smile and lives in a proper bedsit and knows everyone and how to act normally and is accepted in society. She gets headaches a lot and fits of rage where she smashes everything and there's an odd smell of decaying human flesh coming from the drains and the toilet backs up every now and then filling the entire block with sewage and bits of bodies, but this is entirely normal and nothing to worry about.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Oh yeah? Well I had to ski uphill to school (both ways) while fighting off rabid sabre-toothed tigers with my bare hands, and on top of that I had to work for 25 hours a day at the nuclear asbestos factory.
And our numeral system didn't even have a 0. Damn you youngins and your fancy numbers.
Yes good, efficient design is from the ground up but once you've got the underlying structure sorted, you then move onto features. Once all the features are in place, then you move onto optimisation. Optimisation and bug fixing are the final stages of development, after all, you can't optimise things which haven't been implemented yet can you? Often, yes, you do get magical performance boosts late into development (have a look at videogame development for the clearest examples of this). However Microsoft have never promised magical performance boosts. They've just said less bloat, more streamlining.
No new features? There's the improved wireless, the GUI which will now load and be smooth BEFORE graphics drivers are installed (I don't believe any desktop versions of windows have done that since before win95), the interface is hugely optimised, resulting in a much smoother experience from practically everyone who has done the beta. They've shown a version that will run comfortably on netbooks whilst still looking and feeling great (and the OS is SSD optimised). They improved the UAC so you can make it as invasive or as invisible as you wish. They've implemented Libraries, Homegroups, a 'Play To' feature that will let you play media on any connected PCs. They've updated all the basic applications (notepad etc.).