Winrox - Architecture of Acceleration(TM) : Windows 8

Windows 8 and Server 2012 Memory Limits

jeffl — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 11:23:46 GMT

Physical Memory Limits: Windows 8 The following table specifies the limits on physical memory for Windows 8. Version Limit on X86 Limit on X64 Windows 8 Enterprise 4 GB 512 GB Windows 8 Professional 4 GB 512 GB Windows 8 4 GB 128 GB Physical Memory...(read more)

Windows 8 Task Manager

jeffl — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 09:00:00 GMT

In an earlier post I talked about improvements to system monitoring tools in Windows 8 projecting that we should start seeing for the first time GPU monitoring. To my knowledge this has not been included. However, system performance is much more useful...(read more)

Windows 8–Internet Explorer 10 has spell check

jeffl — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 15:04:58 GMT

With Windows 8 and IE 10, spellcheck is in the house! Yes, I did my happy dance. For years I oscillated with changing to competitive browsers for this one feature. My Chrome buddies will be saying “so what, it has been that way for years with the Google...(read more)

Windows 8 Community Preview First Look

jeffl — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 14:04:16 GMT

Throwing caution to the wind, Windows 8 Community Technical Preview went on my main workstation in an in place upgrade process. The first experience is pretty good and there were no errors during the upgrade. Out of the box, I have some funky functionality...(read more)

48-Core Intel Processor - Leveraged by Barrelfish

jeffl — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 15:11:00 GMT

Intel has released a research chip with 48 cores. Called a single-chip data center, its core selling point is that it uses dramatically less energy. What I noticed is that its new architecture leverages software memory control and messaging. As you will...(read more)

The Windows 8 Task Manager? - GPU Usage monitoring becomes a requirement

jeffl — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 05:27:00 GMT

Over the past 2 weeks I have been conducting performance testing on Autodesk Inventor using three different Operating Systems. Essentially the results of the testing revealed that unless applications are optimized for specific hardware much of the horse power we buy goes unused and wasted. One has to wonder if the inherent monitoring tools we see in Windows are really giving us the full picture. Perhaps the easiest thing to point at is Windows 7 current lack of GPU monitoring.

Diagram of a possible Windows 8 Task Manager.

Essentially the next Windows version after Windows 7 will be tackling new hurdles that reflect the way we already use computers but will essentially help to bring huge performance increases which do not exist today. Perhaps the single most important reason why we have not been paying attention to the whole picture as it relates to bottle necks in performance is because we have not had the tools to do it. The saying "out of sight out of mind" brings on new meaning as it relates to monitoring and the GPU is one clear area that has been out of sight.

I certainly want to give credit where credit is due. The Windows 7 team made big strides in performance and my testing revealed improvements of up to 20% over Windows XP in intensive graphics rendering and stunning differences related to DriectX11. Simply on performance alone, Windows 7 makes the cost of upgrading for CPU hungry users worth the lower than ever operating system price.

As we look to the future of monitoring and performance, we are going to see better cooperative processing between GPUs and CPUs. This will mean we will need tools to monitor what is going on to help pinpoint and troubleshoot issues. We are also going to see the removal of what I call "Multi-Core management bottlenecks" through initiative like Barrelfish and we will need a way to monitor that.

I think more than ever we are seeing that hardware relies on the operating system to capture the inherent performance increases which exist under the covers.

Jeff Loucks
Available Technology

Big engine no gas - Multi-Core OS with native support for the hardware we buy still a future prospect.

jeffl — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:32:00 GMT

Well we can hardly say Multi-Core processors are new technology. Those who really know the ins and outs of the way applications run will tell you there is inefficiency in the way operating systems and the applications that run on them use the hardware. This inefficiency can actually make multi-core processors run slower than their single core predecessors for non-optimized applications. The most efficient applications are specifically designed to support newer technologies like Hyper-threading and Multi-Core but those are not the business productivity applications you would expect.

Yes, it is game development that is most preoccupied with the specifics of achieving maximum performance. This is in part because game development is highly volatile market which often builds code from scratch rather than reusing code that has evolved over 10 and in some case 20 years like Microsoft Office. To take advantage of the new power legacy code needs to be rewritten effectively from the beginning to support today's hardware. But therein lies the problem. Today hardware is getting increasingly diverse and what was dual(2) core 18 months ago is Six Core now and the count will grow. So the target is moving and companies may start coding against a future spec which may only exists for 18 months or less. Equally we now have multi-GPU processors which perform graphics computing faster and systems that can take advantage of this performance see massive gains in performance for real life applications like DNA, robotics modeling, Global Weather Pattern prediction and other areas.

Following the scale of predictability, constantly rewriting major application code to take advantage of hardware is impractical. So does that mean hardware vendors should go back to single core? Well maybe, but probably not. Let's look at the history of operating systems. Remember DOS (Disk Operating System), well it evolved to support a bridge between the user applications and the hardware. So architecturally, doesn't it make sense that the operating system needs to take better advantage of new hardware performance? It sure does. Enter http://www.barrelfish.org/ a joint Microsoft Research and Swiss ETH Zürich project. The goal is essentially to create a distributed Multi-Kernel operating system on your box which efficiently communicates through a light weight hypervisor. In other words, an operating system which uses the maximum performance of the underlying technology with out having application developers program specifically toward the optimal hardware.

The Multikernel Model - source: http://www.barrelfish.org/barrelfish_sosp09.pdf

This model is a massive oversimplification of the challenges faced in creating such and operting system. So how long are we talking about before true multikernel lightweight hypervisors rule the roost on our electron hatcheries? All we know at this point as Windows 7 prepares to launch is that incubation has begun on next generation. Windows Eight my Kernels.

Jeff Loucks
Available Technology