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."
Something is wrong with Win7 power management (Score:1, Insightful)
I have an Abit IP35-Pro motherboard. I mostly run Linux but occasionally boot to Windows 7 for some games. Almost always Windows 7 will screw up my BIOS to the point that the automatic CPU fan control no longer works (requiring a hard power-off to fix).
Re:Not Really (Score:2, Insightful)
This story could have come out with an entirely different spin if the headline were simply, "Windows 7 Reduces Power Consumption by 17%."
Welcome to Slashdot!
Re:Not Really (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it's not surprising.
Should have implemented Grand Central [wikipedia.org], I hear it's free and opensource. Even has the Apache license so that it allows use of the source code for the development of proprietary software.
I mean they already borrowed the TCP IP stack. [gcn.com]
Not all code can be done in parallel (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Something is wrong with Win7 power management (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Windows 7 is better than Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
It's slower.
Win7 is basically just a refurbished Vista under the hood.
Re:Not Really (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. A 17% reduction in power consumption doing the same tasks is nothing to scoff at...
Re:Did we really expect different? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Windows version - 7 *ULTIMATE* (Score:2, Insightful)
They tested Windows ULTIMATE, the best of the newest against the oldest patched-up version of XP. And it only saved a marginal amount of power. and may be slightly faster in some operations. What about the versions that the average Joe is going to be running? There are Starter, Home, Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate; each with an increasing price requirement (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/products/compare). How does the "basement" version compare to XP SP3 (or against the various flavors of XP)? Still not apples-to-apples (oh, I hate the puns from that), but might give a better representation of what's going on.
Re:Something is wrong with Win7 power management (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Windows kernel still had global locks then? Wow (Score:2, Insightful)
What you're probably thinking of is patch for the Big Kernel Lock(BKL) in Linux which basically was the origin of SMP scaling in Linux. This article is talking about the kernel dispatcher lock in NT. Two separate things.
Re:Something is wrong with Win7 power management (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
If we take this as true, it's an example of why for some people, paying a premium for a Macintosh is worth the cost and can make sense. You give up the freedom to do all sorts of things (like get a machine with specs perfectly suited to specialized needs for example), but you gain freedom from a lot of problems of this sort.
(Just trying to plant this in the heads of the countless people who argue there's literally no rational reason to buy a Mac, and only fanboys would even consider it. You won't see me argue that there's no such thing as an Apple fanboy, but I will argue that the fanboy phenomenon is not all there is to Apple's sales.)
Re:Windows version - 7 *ULTIMATE* (Score:4, Insightful)
Come on, look at the feature comparisons, and tell me which actual features of Ultimate make it any faster than Professional, or even Home Premium.
If Ultimate was actually faster than any other version of 7, wouldn't it be in tech news sites everywhere? Ultimate is about more features, not about more speed.
Harldy a surprise (Score:1, Insightful)
"What might be surprising is that Windows 7's multithreading changes did not deliver more of a performance punch"
Umm, it may be surprising to any alien who is just visiting our planet, however for people who have bought Microsoft software in the past, this is the norm. Every OS successor ever written by Microsoft (except perhaps MS-DOS 5.0) has 1) required faster hardware, greater memory and has delivered 2) The same or inferior performance. It's not all _bad_, Microsoft does tend to add some bells and whistles. However these are hard to justify (eg: why the FUCK does my Microsoft Keyboard driver consist of 80 MEGABYTES?) - especially when now most of those bells and whistles involve "protecting" the user (and especially Hollywood) from "pirated software"... or trying to dance around huge holes in the OS' security by spamming the user every 5 mins so that their legal team can turn around and say "if your machine got infected, it had to be YOUR fault".
No, if you want to see REAL performance improvements, I suggest linux.
This post will be modded down by Microsoft shills in 5, 4, 3...
Re:I disagree with *you* (Score:3, Insightful)
Is that really the best you can come up with?
Some of us have actually don't development on large Unix servers. There
really isn't any reason the OS should be getting in the way. The
bottlenecks should be all in your applications. A well built application
should be able to light up your entire server, fully exploit all of it's
hardware and scale well while doing it.
Whether or not you overwhelm your scheduler is also something that should
be an application problem rather than an OS problem.
Re:Windows 7 is better than Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
XP x64 shares service packs with Windows Server 2003, and is built upon the same code base.
The reason why XP x64 has gained the "it sucks" reputation is mostly due to missing consumer drivers for XP x64. Almost all decent server hardware supports WS03 x64, but there is a lot of consumer out there that was never supported on XP x64.
Since Microsoft has made x64 support mandatory for Vista upwards, this has changed greatly. Vista SP1 and WS08 are built upon the same code page, just like WS08R2 and Windows 7 are. This makes drivers support easy - and now with Windows 7, many manufacturers start shipping a x64 OS by default (which makes sense - 4GB of RAM isn't "much" anymore).
Re:Not Really (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Windows 7 is better than Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
I have to disagree with the Troll mod.
I ran XP x64 for a few years, and I liked it a lot. Driver support was dodgy in some cases, but it was a pretty solid OS. 64 Bit Vista was indeed slower, much larger and suffered from the well documented issues we all know...
Windows 7 is very Vista-like, but with the benefit of:
1) Two years to get application writers used to the Vista/7 model, and the headaches associated with it.
2) More driver support from vendors
3) Hardware that's two years newer
4) More customizable UAC (if you have it enabled).
That being said... It does run slower than XP x64 on that same hardware. But, you do get Media Center with Vista/7 Home Premium. Sadly, Away Mode for Media Center doesn't work on the x64 editions... And that makes me very sad.
Re:Windows 7 is better than Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
Sadly, it's inevitable here if you discuss anything Microsoft doesn't want discussed.
It's a fact though. They couldn't afford to take any risks after the Vista failure and played it very conservative with Win 7. Of course, admitting that wouldn't generate a lot of hype, so their marketing machine is in overdrive trying to spin a very bland OS as something exciting.
At least it's showing clearly how much Microsoft has infiltrated Slashdot over the past couple of years.
Re:Not all code can be done in parallel (Score:5, Insightful)
Well you bloody well should be, it's basic stuff.
Parallelism has been around for over 20 years now, not to mention the related discipline of distributed computing. It's not new. It's not *that* hard. You don't need to parallelise every last goddamn algorithm if you can split the work up into jobs using thread pools, or into similar tasks.
You think the people that make apache analyse every string comparison they do to see if they could do it more efficiently across a set of vector cores? Well maybe, but most likely they use task parallelism to get multiple threads executing different but comparatively large chunks of code.
This is not a distraction from software development, it's doing it well. And if you're afraid of a little bit of memory allocation then you're doing it wrong...
Re:I disagree with *you* (Score:3, Insightful)
The system they performed testing on has a CPU with a single shared L2 cache so processes moving between CPU cores are not necessarily slower than processes parked on a single core. Since the L2 is shared, there are no L2 cache misses introduced by swapping cores.
A CPU that would better show performance improvements on Windows 7 by higher thread affinity would be one with a split L2 cache like the Intel Kentsfield Core 2 Quad Q6600. The Q6600 would have a lot of L2 cache misses on Vista and XP that would be eliminated by the optimization in Windows 7.
Re:Not Really (Score:3, Insightful)
While actual performance may not be faster, perceived performance almost certianly is. It "feels" snappier, seems to respond better, due to some optimizations in locking and in the graphics subsystem that allows visual feedback in one app to not be blocked or held up by work going on in another app.
That was one of the first things I noticed when I installed Win7.
Vista always felt sluggish. Even when things were working properly and I wasn't experiencing any problems, the entire OS just felt like molasses. There were minute pauses everywhere. Not enough to actually say this is taking longer than it did on XP... But it always felt like the OS was struggling to keep up with me.
With Win7, that hesitation is gone. Everything feels far more responsive. I don't know that I'm actually getting anything done any quicker... I don't know that anything is actually working better... But those minute hesitations are all gone, and the OS feels faster.
Re:Windows 7 is better than Linux (Score:2, Insightful)
their marketing machine is in overdrive trying to spin a very bland OS as something exciting.
You obviously haven't used Windows 7. I've used it since February (or whenever the beta came out). It's the best Windows that they've done, and I'm a big fan of Linux.
Please, try using an OS before bashing it next time.
Re:Not Really (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Windows 7 is better than Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
Suck it, nerds.
So they actually bothered to ship it with a compiler, source, and a text editor that's better than note/wordpad?
I didn't think so.
Why would anyone with half a brain bloat up a OS with those things when only about 0.5%(I'm being charitable here) of the user base would ever find a use for them? You can always download the things you mention for free(sans source) from places like http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualc/aa336402.aspx [microsoft.com]
And yes, Visual Express is much better editor than notepad/wordpad.
If you're a nerd you would know where to get them. If you're a true nerd, you can slipstream them into the OS install.
How come you don't know that Ubuntu itself stopped installing gcc by default from disk. From http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=123542 [ubuntuforums.org]
Or maybe you were just trolling for karma. Uninformed posts like yours get modded up all the time as long as they bash MS and/or praise FOSS. In other words, you're a karmawhore wannabe nerd!
no c compiler!
when i try to install programs that i have downloaded (in source code) , ubuntu dosen't find any c compiler. and when i search on my disk for ex: gcc, cc, g++ it dosen't find anything....
dosen't ubuntu have a standard c compiler?
and if not, how can i install one the easiest way (im a noob)?
Re: no c compiler!
Just open up synaptic package manager and install the package 'build-essential' which will automatically install all compilers and development librarys needed to compile most software.
Re:Windows 7 is better than Linux (Score:2, Insightful)
Windows applications are pre-compiled 99.999% of the time - there is no need for a compiler for the vast majority of the users.
You trade "freedom" and "security" for ease of installation and setup. Any linux user who installs something without personally reading every line of source code gives up the "security" gained from FOSS. Any linux user who ends up grabbing a binary driver for their video card gives up "freedom".
--You should have trolled the registry and the lack of a competent equivalent to package managers.
Notepad is a great text editor. If you want something different/more robust, there are tons of free ones.
--You should have trolled nothing - just queue the vi/emacs debate.
Windows is closed-source, so no, they don't ship it with the source code.
--You should have trolled the ridiculous licensing scheme for different versions, volume licenses, upgrade/full, etc.
Windows 7 needs a new attack vector (Score:2, Insightful)
Dumping on Vista for a moderate overall performance drop is not going to get Joe Average on your side. Jane VideoEncoder and Connie CopyQueen will notice, but do not represent a sizeable part of the market.
Personally I am most bothered by Vista/7's Big Brother moves (protected video path), stupid interface changes and that brain dead "upgrade" of file moving/copying. But looking at what I just typed, I still don't think the average user is ever going to notice/bump into any of these limits/downgrades.
Time to rethink how we critique Windows.
Re:Not Really (Score:3, Insightful)
I thought it was funny to read that they were comparing Windows to Windows. BFD, it just sounds like marketing to me.
LoB
Re:Not Really (Score:3, Insightful)
That was sort of my reaction.
From what I read, I got the impression that Windows 7 isn't any faster than Vista, but it will get the same speed using less energy.
This is a good thing for laptop users, is it not?
Re:Windows 7 is better than Linux (Score:1, Insightful)
Vista SP3 doesn't exist.
Re:Not Really (Score:3, Insightful)
There's progress but what Microsoft has come up with doesn't really fit that picture. When Linux went from the 2.4 kernel to the 2.6 kernel there was a performance hit but you got so much that you didn't notice it took a few more MBs of memory to give it room to breath. Same goes for KDE versions but in all this when you ran it on old hardware, you really had to have a very memory constrained system to feel the pain.
What Microsoft pulled with Vista deserves to let them have to prove they did better than XP instead of giving them a pass and comparing to such a clunker as Vista. It's really difficult to keep giving them a pass on bad choices. And Vista still wanted me to reboot the computer for just plain dumb changes.
I look forward to finding out if Windows 7 is really an improvement over their last valid attempt at OS technology, Windows XP.
LoB
Re:Windows 7 is better than Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
I considered it to score a free Windows 7 "license" but selling my soul for free software just isn't worth it, especially for software I can buy for under $200
Re:Not Really (Score:3, Insightful)