In boot times or general performance? I expected at least a minor bump between my old Thinkpad and my new X60. But no dice. Its quite disappointing.
I have been in the business long enough to not expect a new chip/OS combo to actually perform any faster, but when its the same OS running on much newer hardware, you might expect something…
Maybe when I install Vista on the new machine I will get go faster stripes. Or maybe I should just go Ubuntu.
Dan Davies Brackett says:
November 16, 2006 at 2:51 pm
Perhaps your applications are not generally CPU-bound, even on the slower machine? Sometimes, RAM performance or even disk I/O is the bottleneck on desktops. Or perhaps it *is* faster, but not to the extent that you notice?
dan says:
November 17, 2006 at 3:30 am
The reason is because the dual core only works when a process can be multi-threaded. The whole notion of dual CPUs worked so great for servers for so long because server processes by nature are multi-threaded. Most consumer grade applications don’t multi-thread as it’s harder to program and to be honest only recently could a programmer expect to encounter one on the desktop. As for your booting its probably single threaded for the exact reasons above, also — as stated by another commenter the boot cycle is probably more restricted by HD read speed then anything else.
-d
James Governor says:
November 17, 2006 at 10:08 am
I know all this intellectually, funnily enough. But somehow you expect something being advertised so heavily, and pitched partly in performance terms, as doing *something*. I mean if I were going to ship hardware with an architecture that needed apps to take advantage of it- i would ship some some apps that did… oh for a new boot process.
James says:
November 18, 2006 at 1:43 am
Maybe you can dig into the problem space of why aren’t developers writing more multi-threaded code? The MhZ race is over and performance increases of the future will more than likely happen by making things happen in parralel.
If you want to see applications run faster, consider running them on Azul Systems 384 CPUs…
foomonkey says:
November 20, 2006 at 6:23 pm
I don’t know if it will speed anything up but, you should definitely switch to Ubuntu and give MSFT the boot!