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Time:
08:13 EST/13:13 GMT | News Source:
PC Magazine |
Posted By: Andre Da Costa |
For those of you who have tested the beta or the Windows 7 RTM code, this might not come as any surprise. For those of us whose production machines still run Windows XP (Ziff-Davis and Intel, among others) the improved performance of Microsoft's new operating system is a nice surprise.
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#1 By
3 (213.81.83.50)
at
9/2/2009 10:46:24 AM
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10 seconds here on an intel SSD drive I'm covering for the Windows 7 review
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#2 By
15406 (216.191.227.68)
at
9/2/2009 11:50:44 AM
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Boot time is irrelevant if the system is not usable upon initial display of the desktop. How is 7 in that regard? When your desktop appears, can you actually do stuff or is it busy thrashing your hard disk for the next 2-3 minutes?
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#3 By
23275 (68.117.163.128)
at
9/2/2009 12:15:39 PM
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#3, Yes, it is immediately available. Disc reads are significantly shorter. Depending upon what one is running on start up that hits the NW stack, it can slow it about 3 seconds, before it is usable in that context - say you have MESH running and a half dozen connected gadgets, etc...
On any multi-core system, the scheduler in RTM trim is excellent, as is thread management in general. RC had me worried a bit, but RTM bits appear to have solved any issues we were seeing in this regard. On SSD equipped systems, caching is very different and explorer is available instantly. As boot drives use SSD's it'll help.
Now... MPIO and connected drives... that's another story - as I have shared, they can still be slower. This depends upon the mix of content and a lot of other factors - namely chipset and controller firmware and drivers.
Overall, thrashing is a thing well in the past. Win7 will stun people in this regard - especially on newer Intel HW - X58, P55, Core i9, i7, i5 and i3 based systems. Intel is spreading the threads out nicely and the nasty truth about OS X SL'ss inability to manage this and locks Avenger mentioned last week, are not an issue in Windows 7. MS and its partners are nailing this one and as GA approaches, the drivers and firmware are really starting to show a lot of promise. 2010 is going to be a really nice year for the PC market as it unfolds and power saving alone, drives sales of new hardware. Nice designs in the consumer and pro-sumer markets are going to be very competitive. Our i7's really impress us - and that is really hard to do. On Windows 7 the feel is so dramatically different that it is kind of painful to run anything else. For a long whille I thought little of it, but since Intel shipped some new bits to take advantage of it, I have been very pleased. ***WD RE3 drives (Black) also leverage it extremely well. Those carefully building their baselines are going to be very impressed.
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#4 By
3 (213.81.83.50)
at
9/2/2009 1:50:41 PM
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As lloyd says - within a second of the Win 7 desktop coming up I can load programs, play games etc - no thrashing like it used to be. More so due to the SSD I'd guess but it has improved there over vista.
I use the 80gb SSD as a boot drive and just install games to a 2nd drive except those that really could benefit from the SSD performance (MMO's seem to)
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#5 By
7754 (206.169.247.2)
at
9/2/2009 4:19:28 PM
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Strange article. It talks about how they boost the boot performance by optimizing power utilization and idling unused cores... where do they get these writers?
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#6 By
13997 (68.118.60.164)
at
9/2/2009 5:06:45 PM
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#2 You can immediately do things, it is nothing like your OS X Latch. I almost cry on OS X from the time the desktop appears and the time it takes before you can actually click on an icon on the Dock.
In Vista and Win7, Additional services will load in the background, but with a 'low priority' memory and I/O flag, so they have no impact on user interactions. Win7 takes this further with a few new I/O driver states.
Older hardware that doesn't have drivers that support the I/O 'low priority' states will just take a few seconds longer to boot. (Older hardware as in Pre-2002)
My slowest 'everyday' system is a Netbook Atom 270 w/non-SSD 4200RPM HD - boot time 16secs, resume from Hibernate 4 Secs, resume from Standby less than 1 second. (This includes BIOS time, and it is crappy Acer OneNote BIOS)
#3 Exactly, the CPU scheduler is key to getting the desktop up and running with parallel initialization of drivers, and this is evident even on older P4 HT or Atom HT enabled systems, that are not even true multi-cpu/core systems.
Microsoft has always done well with SMP, but with Win7 the lower level optimizaitons and lock reductions really shine in SMP performance, hence why also at the 'top end' the Server version of Win7 is doing 256 processors without the dramatic drop in 'thread overhead' that other OSes encounter at 8 or 16 processors.
Bottom line...
Even P4 2.4ghz HT users from 2002 will notice a pop in performance in load times and every OS related activity on Win7.
Win7, unlike XP and Vista that support HT technologies, understands the difference between HT simulated cores and true cores/cpus better. This lets Win7 optimize what instructions are sent to a simulated HT core and what ones are NOT sent to the HT core and are instead shoved to the next real core. (Vista SP2 adds in some of these optimizations as well.)
There are some threads that using a HT simulated CPU won't help and could hurt overall performance. This is why it is important for the OS to realize this and these type of calls and send them on to the 'real' next core or schedule them back on the main real core.
(This is one reason when Adobe added 'threading' to Flash, it became a nightmare for any HT CPU enabled user, as trys to manage this threading itself and on a HT system isn't smart enough to back off, and can even bring an i7 9xxx CPU to its knees because it flips off threads to the HT simulated CPU instead of using the real cores.
- Also Flash is really bad when it tries to thread even on a non-HT multi-core system, and is scary the developers have left it in such a horrible state for almost 2 years now. It is also why Silverlight will be decoding HD video and doing cute animations with a 30% CPU load and Flash with be playing a simple vector Ad and consuming 80% of your CPU. Sad.)
PS...
Also as I previously noted, SMP is OS X's major shortfall, and don't even talk HT to OS X, as it doesn't have a clue, nor are the 'simulated' HT CPUs unlocked often enough to be used.
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#7 By
15406 (216.191.227.68)
at
9/3/2009 7:57:47 AM
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#6: What are you? "Son of Parkkker"?? I ask a question about 7 and you start trashing OS X. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough last time: I do not have a Mac. I don't run OS X. I never have. The last time I used a Mac was 25 years ago.
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#8 By
239311 (76.21.72.26)
at
9/3/2009 3:37:33 PM
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For goodness' sake, 11 seconds from SDD is hardly anything to crow about. Is there something wrong with the SSD do you think?
I wonder how fast XP boots off an SSD.
Oh, and while I'm at it, can we please stop praising how much faster Windows 7 is over Vista? Vista doesn't count. I don't know of any Vista user who is on the fence about upgrading from their turd OS to the polished turd OS.
It's Windows XP users they have to win over. Where is the compelling story? "its better than Vista!" and "everything is moved around and looks different" is pretty much all I see in the reviews.
Resorting to trick hardware (SSD) to claim how fast Win7 is at booting is just dishonest.
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#9 By
23275 (68.117.163.128)
at
9/3/2009 8:54:42 PM
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#8, Windows 7, even on much older hardware, boots faster and shuts down faster than XP. It does more than XP ever did and it is far safer to use online by regular people than XP ever was, or ever will be.
Versions of Windows prior to Windows 7 are optimized for hard disk drives rather than SSDs. Windows 7, is optimized for SSDs, as well as for hard disks. It includes support for the TRIM command.
Microsoft's exFAT file system is optimized for SSDs. Support for the new file system is included with Vista Service Pack 1 and Windows 7. A standalone update is required to provide exFAT support in Windows XP - XP does not support SSD's without it and it was not designed for it.
http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?kbid=955704
And for goodness sake, know what you're talking about before you post statements, which are so authoritative.
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