The Wintel machine, which suffered a serious breakdown with Vista, is purring through synchromeshed multi-threaded gears as the release of Windows 7 approaches on October 22.
Intel and Microsoft held a San Francisco briefing on Tuesday to detail how the two were in perfect sync in improving PC performance by matching up Windows 7 development with the latest features of Intel’s processors.
There was no mention of Intel going its own way with a ground-breaking type of memory enhancement, as one analyst reported on Monday, but more on that after the jump.Cout documents have aready revealed how badly Microsoft and Intel handled Vista’s release three years ago.
Internal emails suggested Intel’s 915 graphics chipsets were unable to handle the 3D “Aero” interface of Vista, leading to Microsoft lowering the requirements for “Vista-capable” PCs and upsetting PC makers and consumers in the process.
This time the pair say they have got things right.
“We hit a few very important engineering milestones by working together with Intel,” Mike Angiulo, general manager of Windows Planning, told the briefing, citing the release of the API for third-party developers last October, and the Windows 7 Beta in January.
“We have our single biggest engagement here with Microsoft,” said Stephen Smith, director of Digital Enterprise Operations for Intel.
“We have probably hundreds of engineers around Intel doing architecture, planning, driver development, validation, customer support, all focused around this Windows 7,” he said.
There were demonstrations of co-operation in four areas:
- Energy efficiency collaboration will extend battery life on laptops – Windows 7 software will reduce the calls on a processor through a technique called “timer coalescing”, allowing Intel’s “Deep Power Down Technology” to kick in and keep processors in low-power states, conserving energy.
- Encryption instructions in Intel’s latest hardware, codenamed Westmere, make encrypting of hard drives through Windows 7 – a security measure – at least 10 times faster.
- Intel’s VT-x hardware virtualisation technology will allow older applications to run faster in a virtualised Windows XP mode in Windows 7.
- Windows 7 has improved its scheduler to shepherd data to the different cores in the processor and make sure they are all working at maximum efficiency, cutting down the time that tasks such as video encoding and graphics rendering can be completed.
“The Wintel relationship wasn’t that great with Vista, which is one of the reasons why Vista was Vista, would you say that’s true?” asked one reporter.
Mr Angelo said the difference now was that the Windows 7 team had made releases on schedule, not just software APIs a year ahead of the final version , but notifying hardware makers 18 months in advance what the requirments for Windows 7 would be.
A final demo showed an 11-second boot-up on a PC with an Intel Core i7 processor and solid state drive, enabled by tweaks of the Windows 7 boot-up process – starting services on different threads of cores.
However, Microsoft has not been working with Intel on Flash in another key area, according to a report by semiconductor analyst Jim Handy of Objective Analysis.
He says that Microsoft failed to support properly a Turbo Memory product from Intel in Vista, which promised fast access to hard-drive data and speedier boot-up times.
Microsoft’s ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive features were not optimised for the product and Mr Handy says Microsoft is showing no signs of supporting Turbo Memory’s successor, codenamed Braidwood, in Windows 7.
Instead, Intel is building the software for the product, which attaches Nand Flash memory to the processor to boost performance.
Mr Handy says Braidwood is set to sweep the market over the next four years – it is a more powerful option than traditional Dram memory and a far cheaper one than solid-state Flash-based drives, which outperform disk-based drives but lack their larger capacities.
Although Intel and Microsoft executives did not mention Braidwood at the briefing, it seems likely to make a bigger impression on the consumer than the performance improvements covered.
It promises boot-up times equal to the 11 seconds demonstrated on an SSD and the instant launch of applications, but at a much lower cost.
