Several of you have asked me to add data for Windows XP to my Windows 7 vs. Windows Vista benchmark post. Well, you asked for it!
Rather than build this into a large post, I’ll just post the data here. For any background check out the original post.
Bottom line: Windows 7 build 6956 beats Windows XP SP3 in each of the tests.
Posted by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes
Read More......Intel said Tuesday that solid-state drives can extend battery life up to 30 minutes compared to hard disk drives.
Add the speed advantage of solid state drives and that's two strikes against hard disks. Price parity--strike three--is still a ways off, however. That--and the fact that hard drives offer much larger capacities--will keep hard drives competitive next year.
For now, Intel is evangelizing the benefits of speed and power efficiency.
Most independent benchmarks show that solid state drives perform better than hard disk drives. In some cases, a lot better. That's a given now. One area, however, that isn't so clear cut is power efficiency. Intel tried to lay that argument to rest Tuesday in a conference call.
Intel claims that its SSD extends batter life about 30 minutes on a laptop
(Credit: Intel)
As a preface to the presentation, Knut Grimsrud, Intel fellow and director of storage architecture, made the often-overlooked point that one of the reasons Intel makes solid-state drives is "in order to realize the full value of Intel CPUs." In other words, systems that couple Intel processors with SSDs can deliver better performance overall and do it more efficiently.
In the portion of the presentation focused on power, Grimsrud first compared an Intel SSD with a 5400rpm and 7200rpm hard disk drive. He showed a slide claiming that Intel's SSD spends about 96 percent of its time in low-power states, while a hard drive spends only about 10 percent (see graphic).
Looking at why SSDs are power efficient, he explained that "they way we look at power efficiency is how much power does it takes to get a certain amount of work done."
"So, it's really measure of power per operation performed or operations performed per watt," he said.
While one chart showed an Intel solid state drive's "active power" falling between that of two competing solid-state drives, Grimsrud claimed that Intel's drives get more done in the active state than competitors' drives. "It's how much work are you getting done while you are energized," he said.
Intel compared time spent in lower-power states between SSDs and HDDs
(Credit: Intel)
More specifically, how much power per I/O (input/output) operation is consumed. "That's really the metric for power efficiency," he said. "A very slow SSD that has low power is not necessarily more power efficient. It's just not getting work done at the same rate," according to Grimsrud.
In a real life scenario, Intel showed three systems: one using a hard disk drive, one using a competitor's SSD, and another an Intel SSD. Both the hard drive and competing SSD ran out of power in four hours, Intel claimed, while its SSD allowed the battery to last another 32 minutes, for about a 13 percent battery life extension.
"We're getting secondary savings that are compounding the benefits. Since the Intel SSD is higher performance than the hard drive, the rest of the system can also enter its lower-power state much more quickly than it otherwise would," he said.
Finally, Grimsrud mentioned the 24-hour battery life achieved by the HP EliteBook 6930p. He said that Intel's SSD contributed to this and that internal HP benchmarks show overall performance boosts of up to 57 percent on industry benchmarks, and data transfer rates almost six times faster than traditional hard disks.
Intel is seeing solid results for the Atom processor--possibly giving the first significant evidence of Intel's likely future as a bigger provider of low-cost processors.
Intel confirmed on Tuesday that Atom is hot. CEO Paul Otellini said that Intel didn't meet demand in the third quarter and still can't meet demand. "We did not meed demand in Q3 for the product. We are up again substantially in the fourth quarter. Our expectation is that we will meet demand by the end of the year," Otellini said.
And many of the questions from analysts in Tuesday's earnings conference call revolved around Atom as it delivered $200 million in revenue to Intel in the quarter. "Between the microprocessor and the chipset, we did have a couple hundred million dollars of revenue from Atom in the third quarter," Chief Financial Officer Stacy Smith said. "We do expect that to grow rapidly in the fourth quarter."
What Intel appears to like most about Atom is what it calls "margin characteristics." In other words, it's a low-cost processor, but it yields better margins than typical inexpensive chips like the Celeron. "What we've seen in the third quarter is a very healthy product margin," Smith said.
"On a dollar basis it's equivalent to what we see in Celeron and on a product margin percent it's higher. So if you look at it relative to our low-end mainstream stack, it's generating nice product characteristics," Smith added.
Here's the question: if more and more consumers--particularly in places like China and India--opt for Netbooks with the Atom processor rather than traditional notebooks with standard Intel mobile processors, what kind of an impact will this have on Intel's profits?
Intel claims cannibalization of (higher-margin) mainstream mobile processors is not taking place. "To date we haven't seen any evidence of cannibalization. And believe me we're looking. It's something we watch very carefully," Otellini said. "And one of the best pieces of evidence that we have is the strength in the core mobile business independent of Atom," he added.
But tighter consumer budgets worldwide could push more people toward Netbooks. A Gartner report came out Tuesday that said third-quarter PC shipment growth was driven by sales of sub-$500 notebooks. Netbooks typically sell for less than $500.
Intel's Nehalem now officially Core i7
Intel on Sunday quickly confirmed recent leaks with official word that its next-generation Nehalem processor architecture will be named Core i7. The move continues the Core name despite a major platform change and signals the new line's status as Intel's seventh major architecture since it began with the 8086 decades earlier. The highest-performing versions of the processor line will still add the Extreme Edition badge to reflect their extra features, which often include a speed multiplier unlock friendly to overclockers.
The first chips to bear the Core i7 name will be mainstream desktop parts meant for gamers and conventional systems; Intel doesn't allude to the expected 3.2GHz speed but has previously confirmed the new architecture's switch from a front side system bus to point-to-point connections between the processor and peripherals, an on-die memory controller, and Hyperthreading that can at times double the number of effective cores working on a given task at any one time.
Intel ships its first desktop Core i7 processors in the fall and will follow up with mobile equivalents in early 2009; workstation chips are expected to continue using the Xeon name.
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