Windows 7 On Multicore — How Much Faster? 349
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."
Windows 7 is better than Linux (Score:5, Funny)
Less power? (Score:5, Funny)
Nooo! I was hoping that power consumption would continue to increase! Sooner or later our PCs would require 1.21GW!
Not Really (Score:5, Funny)
'What might be surprising is that Windows 7's multithreading changes did not deliver more of a performance punch,'
No, it's not surprising.
Snow Leopard is better than Windows 7 (Score:3, Funny)
Suck it, Microsoft drone.
Re:Less power? (Score:5, Funny)
Indeed. So much work with my lightning catcher for nothing.
Well, time to go back to the human reanimation experiment.
Re:Something is wrong with Win7 power management (Score:5, Funny)
Linux is better that Snow Leopard (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not fast enough (Score:5, Funny)
I see you are using Windows 7... :)
Re:Something is wrong with Win7 power management (Score:2, Funny)
Any examples?
(Score:-1, Troll)
There' s one ---^ :)
Re:Windows 7 is better than Linux (Score:5, Funny)
I bet you even threw a Windows 7 launch party.
Re:Not Really (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Windows 7 is better than Linux (Score:5, Funny)
Agreed. I particularly like the feature where you rename a folder, and it shows up as renamed, but on the filesystem, it's still called "New Folder". Gotta love the strict testing that Microsoft put in.