Windows 7 technical briefing, live blogging archive

Ok, that’s over. For those who attend IDF, there’s a presentation on this topic at the show.

Thanks for following this event on live.ubergizmo.com

Microsoft is being pressed hard by reporters to put a number of on how much better Windows 7 is, but There’s no definitive answer. Again, “it depends”.

Better at what? Faster at what? More battery while doing what?

Those of you who read benchmarks know that there needs to be a context: PC configuration+app.

Microsoft says that it has been working hard on the Atom platform as well, using the same methodologies that were presented today.

We’ll keep an eye on independant benchmarks to see how much of a gain users could get.

Right now, Microsoft doesn’t want to say that Netbooks with Windows 7 *will* have a better battery life. We’re back to “it depends”.

Microsoft’s answer: “we’re working with popular platforms to make sure that Windows 7 works well”. Our take: You can bet that AMD will have something too. A lot of the improvement has been done at the system level and will benefit any processor.

The brute-force way of making boot faster is to use a super-fast CPU and a super-fast hard drive…

But a better way of doing it is to remove all the waiting time by not loading unused files/services and by spreading the task over multiple cores/threads.

If we don’t take the BIOS start time into account, Microsoft just showed us a 11 seconds boot sequence. We’ll see how that will translate into a consumer PC with an average processor and hard drive.

As a reference: my Macbook Pro boots in about 20 seconds from “Power On” to Desktop.

Yes, Microsoft now has the tools to hunt down battery-life offending processes and focuses on the responsiveness because in the end, that’s waht you and I want: having the computer boost our productivity… not slow it down.”Optimizing the whole system” is MS’s new moto.

Well, there you go: in a synthetic benchmark (right) the gains are much higher than in a practical application (left). That’s normal…

With hyper-threading, image processing is faster…

Hyper-threading: if you’re not familiar with it, the idea is that by adding a little bit of hardware, Intel can handle more processes in parallel. It is like adding cores… but without adding cores. This was introduced with the Pentium 4.

Basically, Windows 7 is not smarter at using more threads and more cores: that’s the main idea being communicated today.

The theoretical result is higher responsiveness and lower power.

How does one know if their system supports the hardware virtualization from Intel (VT-x)?

Users can look at CPUID to know if the processor supports hardware virtualization. Looking for Virtualization setting in the BIOS might be a good hint too.

The black window shows a graphic “intensive” application. It works pretty well.

Note that XP mode is an optional feature. It requires some configuration and at this point Microsoft considers that this is a business feature that would require some IT support.

If you want to install it yourself, it requires some power-user knowledge. (Download & setup the XP Virtual hard drive…)

For those who use apps that will run only on Windows XP, the virtualization/emulation of XP is handy. Microsoft has made this easier to use in Vista.

Guess which one has hardware support…

Hint: if you only have a small amount of sensitive information, why not use an encrypted virtual drive like TruCrypt instead of encrypting the whole disk with bitlocker?

AES encryption is strong enough to be used at the “Top Secret” level in the U.S government.

Windows 7 includes an API that lets any developer use AES. If it’s easy enough, that could come in handy. Honestly, this is not really a sexy topic.

What Intel is trying to communicate is that their new hardware can boost AES performance by 10X.

This can make a difference if you use full disk encryption with BitLocker (a Vista feature). The interesting part is that faster processing will also lead to lower power consumption.

That’s a question that just popped.

The official answer is: it did happen before.

My personal opinion is that Power was not an issue before, and therefore the emphasis on building tools like the tracer was simply not there. Power and performance is now critical and get real attention from everyone involved.

Adding features doesn’t sell OS and computers anymore.

There are a lot of questions from the audience about “how much” battery savings can be expected from Windows 7… well, the answer from Intel and Windows is : “it depends”…

It’s kind of tough to boil it down to a number because it depends on OEMs, usage patterns, default configuration, driver and so on.

Overall, the idea is that Microsoft has worked on some fundamental improvements at the system level that should help everyone. Intel is helping Microsoft by providing more “visibility” at the hardware level so that the OS can make the proper decisions.

On the same system, developers have done a better job at finding what power is required for a particular task. The right graph is more interesting: it shows a 11% improvement in power consumption.

Note: the display, the single greatest source of power consumption, is not taken into account here. The final battery life savings is not 11%

Vista could never stay in idle mode for more than 20 milliseconds.

Windows 7 can stay in idle mode longer, this saving battery live for the end-user.

There’s nothing like “tracing” what’s going to analyze it later. The top graph shows CPU utilization. The bottom graph shows how the frequency changes. There are more graphs that show power, and even more detailed things.

It’s a classic but efficient way of improving a goal. If they can measure it, they will improve it. It’s (almost) that simple.

On laptops, most of the time, the user isn’t doing much and the computer is in Idle mode… How much it consumes when doing little or nothing is key to overall battery performance.

For example, if timer events happen randomly, the systemends up beingawake all the time. By aggregating those timer events, the processor can stay in idle mode more often and longer.

On the right, the laptop runs with the latest Windows 7 version. On that system the power drain is much less (it’s got one more hour of battery left, 5:48 versus 4:30 right now) while running the same app (movie).

The computer on the left, runs on Windows Vista.

Having the OS and the platform builder work together seems like a good idea. In fact, Intel and Microsoft have been working together forever on that topic, but now, low-power sells. I didn’t just 5 years back.

Right now, we’re being told how all the partners have worked together to make this better than ever… It’s interesting to have some background, but we were not expecting anything less :)

Microsoft: This time around Windows did not require twice as much resources compared to the previous release. (Phew!)

AES encryption running on Intel’s 32nm Clarckdale processor. AES is used everywhere. Online payment is a good example.

Today,Intel and Microsoftwill show a number of Windows 7 demos running on Intel’s upcoming processors and chipsets.

We’re live with Intel and Microsoft for a technical briefing in San Francisco. Both companies will talk about energy efficiency, collaboration, virtualization and performance