windows 8 is almost here...

[NJRoadfan]

the reason microsoft did this was because intel introduced that turbo feature with the core i7 and in order to get the maximum benefit when only 1 or 2 cores where loaded up it had to be ensured that threads wouldn't be bounced between cores, thus alternating which cores where under load and not allowing turbo to reach it's full potential.

the end result was that pc's without a core i7 and loads of ram suffered from decreased performance some of the time (that and all the background services that sucked up system resources, such as the intrusive uac, defrag that is set to defrag automatically in the background, that silly search indexing feature), it all conspired to sour people on vista.

The Core i7 wasn't introduced until 2 years after Vista was released. Taking into account the delay between RTM and release of Vista and general availability of the Core i7 chip, you are looking at close to a 3 year gap. So its unlikely Microsoft designed the threading model for this chip. The other reasons are more likely for the slow down, particularly the "Super Prefetch" caching system that never worked right.

[deadrats]

The Core i7 wasn't introduced until 2 years after Vista was released. Taking into account the delay between RTM and release of Vista and general availability of the Core i7 chip, you are looking at close to a 3 year gap. So its unlikely Microsoft designed the threading model for this chip. The other reasons are more likely for the slow down, particularly the "Super Prefetch" caching system that never worked right.

vista was released worldwide jan 2007, bloomfield was introduced in 2008, considering how close intel and microsoft work with one another (it's not called "wintel" for nothing)):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core_i7

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista

i ran across this article that claims vista's thread management model works exactly the opposite of what i said:

http://www.techradar.com/news/computing-components/processors/how-windows-vista-drags-...i7-down-480468

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2832/5

it looks like my memory was playing tricks on me, vista juggles threads across cores aggressively in an attempt to keep the system responsive and windows 7 features "core parking" which locks a thread to a particular core.

the funny thing is that i can still spin this revelation to support my contention that vista would be the superior OS for a high end multi core system.

maybe i should have majored in political science, lol.

[ranchhand]

Well, I have been running W7/64 Ultra for over a year now, and I am very happy with it. I got my son a high-end lap with a 17" screen; he used Vista for 8 months and wasn't happy with the performance. I wiped his drive, installed W7 on it, and the pickup in speed and performance was definitely noticeable. Now he can do his music editing with Power Tools with no hesitation or lags like he used to have. I managed to find the chipset, audio & video drivers for his model updated for W7, but others we had to go with W7 generic. So far he is very happy with W7. I had the same experience with a neighbor who got W7 and asked me to help him install it. The only thing that is unfortunate is that Hijack This is almost useless in both Vista and W7 for scanning for virus infections, but I guess that is a part of advancing technology.