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What Intel Giveth, Microsoft Taketh Away

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Ralf Maximus:
Fascinating article chronicling what we've all suspected: that each version of Windows + Office consume all available workstation horsepower, no matter how new the hardware.

http://exo-blog.blogspot.com/2007/09/what-intel-giveth-microsoft-taketh-away.html

Included are interactive benchmarks of every conceivable combination of Windows and Office since 2000.

Found via Raymond Chen's superb blog, the current topic as I type is a research paper on "Who would win in a fight between a penguin and a lemur?".  No, I'm not kidding.

zridling:
Glad you listed this, Ralf. This was the first thing I noticed with Vista back in early February — it ate everything you threw at it. Office 2007 is the same way, as the post states, requiring 12 times the memory and 3 times the processing power as previous versions of Windows and Office.

Sorta ruins the notion of "optimizing" the codebase for better/faster/newer hardware. I'm sure they're already working on how to slow down Penryn chips.

icekin:
http://blip.tv/file/340692

Okay, I thought this was funny. If you are a VISTA user, please do not get offended.

nontroppo:
F**k, that chart is just sensational; even though I believe the overall premise, I cannot believe the magnitude of the that. I think the sheer scale of regression with Vista can't be so large. I suspect a change in working set allocation is responsible for the memory change (more memory allocated is not necessarily bad), but I cannot explain the overall speed regression. I don't have a clear sense of how that data was aggregated, nor thus its variability. I do realise incredulity is hardly a cogent argument against that data ;-)

Darwin:
After my experience with a Vista notebook (that was the same model with the same spec as an earlier XP MCE notebook that I tried a year ago), I believe the chart. Dual Core processing and 2GB RAM and it was a slug compared to my XP Pro machine with a four year old Centrino chip and 2GB RAM. Loved the hardware, loathed the OS's resource hogging.

Interesting that the analysis also supports another of my suspicions: Win2k on a 7 year old PIII-E machine with 512MB RAM was quicker than my Centrino with a gig of RAM. Makes me want to dualboot the Centrino with Win2k and install Office 2000 on it...

Sidenote: when I first read the "Lemur vs. Penquin" aside in Ralf's first post, my mind managed to convert it to "Leopard vs. Penquin" - imagine my surprise when I found not a shootout between OS X and Linux but a paper speculating about who would win a real fight - a flightless bird or an arboreal primate. Nice.

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