Slashdot Mirror
Windows 7 On Multicore — How Much Faster?
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Andrew Binstock tests whether Windows 7's threading advances fulfill the promise of improved performance and energy reduction. He runs Windows XP Professional, Vista Ultimate, and Windows 7 Ultimate against Viewperf and Cinebench benchmarks using a Dell Precision T3500 workstation, the price-performance winner of an earlier roundup of Nehalem-based workstations. 'What might be surprising is that Windows 7's multithreading changes did not deliver more of a performance punch,' Binstock writes of the benchmarks, adding that the principal changes to Windows 7 multithreading consist of increased processor affinity, 'a wholly new mechanism that gets rid of the global locking concept and pushes the management of lock access down to the locked resources,' permitting Windows 7 to scale up to 256 processors without performance penalty, but delivering little performance gains for systems with only a few processors. 'Windows 7 performs several tricks to keep threads running on the same execution pipelines so that the underlying Nehalem processor can turn off transistors on lesser-used or inactive pipelines,' Binstock writes. 'The primary benefit of this feature is reduced energy consumption,' with Windows 7 requiring 17 percent less power to run than Windows XP or Vista."
What the new languages and OS's are doing, are just making it easier for developers to make code that runs on parallel processors. However most of us are not trained to write parallel code. And there are some algorithms that cannot be parallelized. What the moderns OS are doing is taking code that was designed to run multi-threaded or parallel in the first place and in essence have them run more efficient on multi-processors. As well as giving you some tools to make development easier and stop us from trying to work around all those conflicts that distracts us from software development. Much like how String classes came common for developers so we didn't need to fuss around with allocations just to do some basic string manipulation... (Alocate space, calculate the memory offset insure the last character was a 0x00...) aka making development really easy for buffer overflow errors if you missed a step.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Windows 7 (like all modern versions of Windows) does nothing with the BIOS at all - the BIOS ceases running as soon as Windows starts booting. You don't even need to *have* a BIOS to run Win7. And, if a power cycle fixes the issue, it clearly is not a BIOS problem.
If the device drivers for your motherboard have a bug - which sounds more like the cause of your issue - then that isn't a Microsoft problem at all, since they didn't write the drivers. Contact Abit for support.
It's slower.
Win7 is basically just a refurbished Vista under the hood.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Agreed. A 17% reduction in power consumption doing the same tasks is nothing to scoff at...
As for Windows 7 being an improved OS, yes it is. It is a substantial improvement over XP and Vista in a variety of ways such as security, virtualization support, performance on multi-core processors, support for 64-bit processors, desktop usability etc. Perhaps none of them matter to you or don't matter enough to switch but that's besides the point.
I think that's being a little too easy on Microsoft. Getting drivers right is a shared effort of both the hardware vendor and MS. Both parties need to do their jobs right in order for the overall system to work.
Even if it is a bad driver, one might blame MS for not making Windows 7 sufficiently compatible with Vista at the device-driver-interface level. Or for building an ecosystem in which closed-source, maintainable-only-by-the-OEM drivers are the norm, etc.
I think the best we can say here is that the MS-Abit team seems to have produced a bug.
Microsoft's "Engineering 7" blog has several telemetrics examples from Windows 7 vs. Vista.
As a Microsoft Partner, we've been using Vista exclusively on good hardware (2.5+ Ghz Intel Dualcores, 4GB RAM, 32bit Vista Enterprise).
We've completed our Migration to Windows 7 x64 two weeks ago. That's 10 desktops and 20 laptops. Everyone that has moved to Vista to 7 is glad that their computer is now faster.
Personally, i've witnessed that it's quicker to respond, though the tasks take roughly the same time in the end.