Windows 7 on multicore: How much faster?

Lust, gluttony, greed, anger, envy, pride, and sloth – Microsoft’s new OS suffers from each deadly sin. Here’s what you can do to minimize the toll each sin takes

The seven deadly sins — for centuries, they’ve shaped the imaginations of poets, priests, and politicians, while giving the great unwashed a frame of reference: Do these things and you’ll burn for sure!

When it comes to software, few products have inspired as much debauchery as Windows. From lust to sloth to envy, Microsoft’s flagship OS platform has proven to be a source of manifold transgression. Zealots have praised it, and pundits have cursed it, while those of us in the IT trenches are forced to actually live with it.

So with Windows 7 just around the corner, it makes sense to examine the product through the prism of these 7 deadly sins. Just how does Microsoft’s new OS drive users to acts of iniquity? And what, if anything, can you, the IT administrator, do to manage the carnal impulses and aberrant behaviors this interloping force of nature engenders?

Lust: Beware Windows 7′s faux-Mac experience, which may drive users to the real thing
Windows 7 inspires lust. Specifically, it arouses an unhealthy yearning for a better computing experience. If you’re an IT administrator, you can see the signs easily: a lingering glance at a contractor’s MacBook Pro, an iPhone in use instead of the standard-issue BlackBerry, browser histories filled with links to macworld.com articles, telltale “my other PC is a Mac” bumper stickers adorning their cubicles.
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Windows 7 on multicore: How much faster?

Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system is receiving raves in its pre-release testing. While much of the kernel that lies at the heart of the operating system is based on Vista code, several key advances have been made that get rid of Vista annoyances and greatly improve the user experience. Inside the kernel, one important change centers on how multithreaded applications are run. The threading advances provide benefits in energy reduction, scalability, and, in theory, performance.

To check out the benefits on the desktop, I ran tests that reflect the most common use case for heavily threaded desktop apps — namely, graphics-oriented software. Programs such as Adobe Photoshop and other graphical applications query a system’s capabilities at startup and self-configure workloads accordingly. They typically use all the processor cores and as much RAM as they can get away with monopolizing. This approach enables them to provide the fastest performance. So I checked how such programs perform using the Viewperf benchmark (an omnibus graphics benchmark from SPEC, the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation) and Cinebench, which is a pure rendering benchmark from Maxon Computer. Both benchmarks follow InfoWorld’s tradition of using benchmarks that you can download and run on your own systems to see how your mileage varies. Both benchmarks can be obtained at no cost.

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The 7 deadly sins of Windows 7

Lust, gluttony, greed, anger, envy, pride, and sloth – Microsoft’s new OS suffers from each deadly sin. Here’s what you can do to minimize the toll each sin takes