Microsoft and Intel share an age old partnership of working operating system with processors respectively. Intel is closely working with Microsoft to enable Windows 7 make the best of multi-core and multi-threading supporting chip line up for faster performance. Joakim Lialias, Intel alliance manager, posted about a feature called SMT parking that'll allow Windows 7 to be able to make the best of Intel Hyper threading Technology for 'enabling better performance on hyper-threaded, multi-core Intel processors'. Looks like Microsoft is competing against Apple's Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard that is capable of using multi-core CPU and GPUs.
When Intel rolled out multi-core chips, the industry stalwarts said that Windows platform and the applications
lacked potential to make best of multi-core CPUs. Apple recently announced new Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard with 64-bit computing, multi-CPU, GPGPU and OpenCL support. Basically, Snow Leopard is coded for making the best out of multi-core Intel processors for overall system performance and stability.
On the other hand, Microsoft too boasts of more stable Windows 7 and has tied up with Intel to make it work better with its multi-core processors. Lialias stated that Microsoft has worked closely with Intel on improving 'the boot/shutdown/sleep/resume times on Intel platforms during the development of Windows 7 to identify opportunities to optimize Intel drivers and BIOS as well as Windows 7'.
Traditionally, System performance was boosted by overclocking the CPU clock to make the sequential application code run faster. Gradually, Intel implemented multiple cores on smaller silicon die, thereby giving more room for higher overall system performance. Not many major applications available today are able to make the best of the multi-core processors.
Apart from that, Intel-Microsoft team is also working to technologies that will make Windows 7 work faster on SSDs - obviously it's about netbooks and laptops. The process of read and write would be speedy on SSDs with a firmware update from Intel. In June, Intel had already rolled out graphics drivers supporting Windows 7 which supported DirectX 10. Microsoft has incorporated the upcoming DirectX 11 platform level graphics driver capabilities for splitting tasks to different cores for boosting graphical performance and application processing.
It's just the matter of time when the two titans - Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard will battle against each other. This time, it would be on grounds of system performance, hardware acceleration and also system stability.
Resources: http://www.techtree.com/India/News/Microsoft_Intel_to_make_Windows_7_run_Faster/551-104853-580.html
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