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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.
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*
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();
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! :)
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
(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.
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.