Microsoft and Intel gathered a bunch of the tech media to talk up their collaborative efforts during the development of Windows 7. As is usual with these events, there was a mix of very technical media (Gordon Mah Ung and Will Smith from Maximum PC were there) as well as mainstream media. The main content actually offered some good technical info on some of the underpinnings of Windows 7.
As is also usual with these sorts of events, both Microsoft and Intel representatives spent time dodging pesky, “off message” questions from mainstream media. Questions about AMD, Apple and other similar topics were deftly and sometimes not-so-deftly dodged.
While what was all very amusing, the tech content is worth talking about. I’m going to touch on a couple of topics near and dear to my heart: multicore performance and energy efficiency.
It’s All about Power
Before you can go about making an operating system power efficient, the OS has to have a pretty deep understanding of the underlying hardware, and how it uses power. Learning all this required building a lot of hooks into Windows to meter power usage.
Microsoft has been capturing this data for years, using tools and hooks built into Windows XP, Vista and now Windows 7. During those releases, the tools and granularity of the data captured improved over time. Microsoft can now capture power data from the CPU, chipsets, individual components, down to the I/O device level (eg, power usage or behavior of an individual device attached to a particular USB port.)
Metering Platform Power Use
Oh nice, to see the new scheduler learning how to know the diference between virtual and phisical cores. Less power is ok too. But will that new CPU architecture require a new socket? cus Im still on 775 and Im planing to go i7 next holydays, should I wait?, I dont wanna get stuck on an expensive great mobo but with the wrong socket (no scalability) like happend to me on 478 times.
Intel is coming out with a new socket, but the old socket will be around, too. See my earlier post on Socket 1366 and 1156:
http://www.improbableinsights.com/2009/08/19/the-future-of-socket-1366/
I can’t wait for Windows 7! And with the new Intel i5 platform right around the corner, will have a lot of possibilities. I can use a i7 chip for my professional workstation, and the i5 as a home computer.
Very cool stuff. Computers are so beastly hot nowadays to achieve higher and higher levels of performance. But many of us don’t need all that power all of the time. The same has been true of cars for many years. Timer coalescing actually reminds me of that Chrysler innovation where when you’re cruising on the highway the engine will shut off half the cylinders to save gas.
Good report. Windows is a better deal on laptops/netbooks than Linux because of this, and laptops are the new majority market.
Give Apple credit, though, for having a good S3-style sleep for years, while Windows machines were hanging every time you closed the lid. There’s lot’s of history behind this New Religion.
And be ready for side effects. Do mb vendors realize they now need accurate HW clocks? Perhaps your mb coin cell won’t last long, now? Who knows?
Great article, I’m looking forward to 7 for a number of reasons, if it will actually have a decent sleep mode that would be great.
Any word when we might see Core i7 or i5 notebooks anytime?