Demystifying Wintel's performance behind the win 7 system

Everyone is working hard to improve their system performance at this time, but there are many ways to improve system performance, but there is a way to estimate that everyone has never thought about it, that is to use Intel to improve, how to improve it, the following gives Everyone introduces the introduction. Wintel, a very interesting word, is literally easy to understand, this is a very powerful camp — — it consists of Microsoft OS and Intel Processor.

We are talking about the two exciting results of cooperation.

The result of their collaboration is higher performance, lower energy consumption, or both, depending on the number of open threads in your application.

Better processor core management is an important feature of current Intel processors. These chips use Synchronous Multi-Threading (SMT) technology to enable each core to run two threads simultaneously. That is, if SMT is enabled, the dual/quad core processor will grow to 4/8 logical threads.

Nehalem/Westmere's architecture is very focused on the code that is actively running on each core. When the core is still inactive for a certain amount of time, the transistor driver will turn off the core of the processor. This feature is designed to save energy. However, the processor can also increase the frequency of the active core to a certain extent in order to obtain better performance. This technology is called TurboBoost.

But be aware that this feature requires the OS to work with. It must be ensured that the active core of the processor has enough time to turn off the transistor. This was difficult to achieve before Windows 7 was released. The threads that create the application are arranged and executed by the operating system, and the application cannot control itself. They can only control which pipes are used. Prior to Windows 7, the Windows kernel did not consider arranging which cores a thread was running on. If there is no core available in real time, Windows thread scheduling will select a running thread or a thread waiting to be swapped, shutting it down.

Since previous Windows schedules for its scheduled threads is not planned, an application that uses three threads may use each core in turn. As a result, the power saving feature and TurboBoost will be affected because no core will remain inactive for a long time. However, Windows 7 often schedules threads to always run on a single kernel instead of letting them work in turn, and idle cores are shut down.

This mode effectively controls energy consumption and also improves performance with TurboBoost. The real victory is in energy saving. In desktop systems, power consumption may not be the most important standard, but they are very important for servers and mobile devices. Especially for mobile users, when enjoying longer battery life, Nehalem's mobile processors will appear in consumer electronics.

And the latest situation is even more cheerful, Intel's smart processor has evolved to the second generation, Advanced Vectore Xtensions is a delightful addition to the newgeneration. This new instruction set must be supported by Windows 7 Service Pack 1 in Windows OS. With the help of Win7 SP1, SandyBridge processor will perfectly show the strength of AVX —— it will greatly enhance the processor's floating point computing power. In some floating-point intensive programs (such as graphics rendering, multimedia encoding, 3D games, etc.), we will see extremely significant performance gains. Of course, regarding this upgrade, we have already tested it on the new platform mobile terminal products, and the actual results are really exciting.

In a nutshell, when your Program, your Processor, and your OS provide support for AVX, the application will be surprisingly fast. How fast? Responsibly speaking, it costs nearly half of Westmere's original OS under Win7.

This is a new product, perhaps not for many people, but it really improves the performance of the system. It may not be used in many aspects, but I believe it will be available soon. .