Generational Windows Multicore Performance Tests 228
snydeq writes "Windows XP, Windows Vista, and (soon) Windows 7 all support SMP out of the box, but as InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy notes, 'experience has shown that multiprocessing across discrete CPUs is not the same thing as multiprocessing across integrated cores within the same CPU.' As such, Kennedy set out to stress the multiprocessing capabilities of Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 in dual-core and quad-core performance tests. The comprehensive, multiprocess workload tests were undertaken to document scalability, execution efficiency, and raw performance of workloads. 'What I found may surprise you,' Kennedy writes. 'Not only does Microsoft have a firm grasp of multicore tuning, but its scalability story promises to keep getting better with time. In other words, Windows Vista and Windows 7 are poised to reap ever greater performance benefits as Intel and AMD extend the number of cores in future editions of their processors.'"
Better multicore perfom to support more bloat (Score:3, Interesting)
Ok, so if the average user is still doing the same basic tasks, browser/email/word processing it kills me that I'm now requiring the CPU power of yesterdays servers to do these basic tasks. Having multicore systems enables software vendors to increase the bloat, because the increase in cpu/ram will take care of it; therefore hiding this increase in bloat from the user. It's no difference in converting all cars to lead bodies; as long as we put 1000hp engines in them. The user experience doesn't change b/c they still have the same 0-60 times.
For example, I've always wondered how much CPU time is wasted due to anti-virus software? Let's say you have a large windows on VMware environment. Each VM needs to have antivirus on it, if you've got a server with 10-20 VMs on it; you've got 10-20 instances of anti-virus running. There's gotta be some way to calculate the total amount of CPU and power (W) wasted on this single server to just running the antivirus scanning...
How about an increase in CPU, but either keeping the bloat the same?
Re:The Money Quote (Score:5, Interesting)
Because ALL software has to run the DRM hook gauntlet. basically, the way Microsoft has set it up is that the DRM processes are ALWAYS running and CANNOT be disabled. So every single bit of data is processed through the DRM loop, slowing everything down.
Re:The Money Quote (Score:3, Interesting)
Mod up. I used XP 64 and was really happy with it... and then it randomly became EXTREMELY slow when doing any IO, it seemed. I don't know why. I went back to XP 32 bit, which works great for under 4GB RAM. Then I got more RAM and had to get a 64 bit Windows (and yeah, had to be Windows unfortunately, software constraints... available on Mac or Windows; VM/Wine not an option due to performance issues, AFAIK)
Re:The Money Quote (Score:4, Interesting)
"How do you know? Do you have the source code to Windows Vista?"
Do you?
"Everyone I've seen that blames "DRM" for Vista being slow has no idea what they are talking about, and are just going "Vista has DRM and is slow, therefore it must be slow because of DRM"."
At a minimum, the changes to the driver model required to support DRM add a whole load of extra bloat that sucks performance; code that previously would have been tightly integrated into drivers now involves a lot of interaction with the OS.
Re:So what? (Score:2, Interesting)
look up the performance of Windows 95( the 32bit OS as MS claimed ) on the then new PentiumPro( the 32bit optimized CPU Intel claimed ). hint, an old 150MHz Pentium outperformed a 150MHz PentiumPro when running Windows 95. Real 32bit OSs like *nix, OS/2, and Windows NT showed vast performance increases running on the 32bit PentiumPro. It then took Intel almost 2 years to bring back 16bit optimizations into their latest CPU hardware.
I don't think this is about Microsoft being buddies with the hardware people. I think it has more to do with Microsoft designing poor software and throwing alot of it at the distribution such that just to get the OS off the metal, it's really resource intensive and their core OS guys are tasked with getting as much out of the available hardware as they are capable of.
Remember, tests had already shown that Windows XP outperformed Vista by 100% on the same hardware. Microsofts marketing is doing a better job now and we are constantly seeing performance tests showing Vista faster than XP and even Windows 7(beta) being faster than XP. And we are seeing alot of these performance test so once again, chalk it up to Microsoft's marketing because do you really think their OS people did in less than a year what they couldn't do in over 5 years?
LoB
Re:Linux supports SMP out of the box (Score:2, Interesting)
I got things to work better by tweaking the thread scheduler to deadline, tweak 'swappiness' and some others I don't recall. Took days of research.
It still has occasionally Gnome UI lockups but it's usable now. I didn't treak XP at all to get concurrent processes without GUI lockups.
I'm sticking with Linux for a number of reasons, but performance on my quads is not one of them.
Re:NUMA (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:DRM Check (Score:0, Interesting)
The application goes "Hey ! Windows ! I need a protected path before I can play this media."
So network performance wasn't degraded severely when audio was played black like this [zdnet.com], right?
"Please note that some of what we are seeing is expected behavior, and some of it is not. In certain circumstances Windows Vista will trade off network performance in order to improve multimedia playback. This is by design"
Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
Complete and utter bullshit.
We're a VFX company. We work with all manner of multi-core applications. Cloth simulation, Global Illumination, Caustics, Optical Flow tracking, compositing etc etc.
Every single one of our computers are 64 bit. We have Windows XP x64 and we have Vista x64.
I'm looking at a chart right this very second of render times for our current job. 9 million polygons, 6GB of RAM usage, 100% CPU usage across all 4 cores. NO RENDER PERFORMANCE HIT. Render software scales better than just about anything else on earth. Each core renders its little slice of the scene and returns it to the application. There is no cross talk, it scales pretty much linearlly with very very little overhead. If anything is going to expose some sort of massive performance hit, it would be rendering.
If Vista x64 is running a DRM check on every ray casting function we would see it. If Vista was running 118% slower we would see it. We have identical machines running the identical piece of software and they're returning on average statistically identical results.
I've got millions of photons bouncing around a scene and supposedly each calculation is being 'taxed' by some DRM check? I don't see it.
They're all generating pixels, what could be more "DRM related" than reading footage, processing footage and creating new footage?
Maybe this test found some piece of software that doesn't run well on Vista. I can buy that argument. But Vista and Windows 7 are not substantially slower than XP at processing. In fact they seem to be no slower from my experience with a wide variety of extremely processor and memory intensive tasks.