Windows 7: multi-core benchmarks

While much of the kernel that lies at the heart of Windows 7 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 centres 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 monopolising. 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 can be downloaded and run on your own systems to see how your mileage varies, for no cost.

Windows 7 review

I ran the benchmarks on a Dell Precision T3500 workstation. The T3500 is an entry-level workstation that represents the kind of system that high-end graphics users who work on large images or complex projects are likely to employ.

It sports a quad-core Xeon W3540 (Nehalem) processor running at 2.93GHz, an Nvidia FX Quadro 4800 graphics card, and 4GB of RAM. I expect that 12 to 18 months from now, its capabilities will represent the high end of the desktop (that is, subworkstation) market.

For this review, we used three identical hard drives, each preloaded by Dell with the latest versions of Windows XP Professional, Vista Ultimate, and Windows 7 Ultimate - all 32-bit - with the latest drivers the company makes available.

We then ran the benchmarks on each OS, swapping in a new disk when we were done with the previous operating system. This approach allowed us to see what benefits each version of Windows provided when run on identical hardware. The results for performance appear in the table below.

Performance benchmark results for three versions of Windows

These results suggests that when considering Windows 7, performance should be viewed as a reasonable justification for upgrading from Windows XP, but not a driver for migration from Vista.

The flat performance results against Vista are reasonable given that, as we said earlier, Windows 7 is based on the Vista kernel.

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NEXT PAGE: New locking mechanism

1. Our tests show speed isn't the only benefit, or the main one of the new OS
2. New locking mechanism
3. Energy consumption

Continued...
1 | 2 | 3 | NEXT >

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