Windows7How

Microsoft Windows 7 vs Apple Snow Leopard – Multiprocessing, Networking & Energy consumption

September 17, 2009

Nowadays, we have a really strange paradox. On one side, there are the hardware manufacturers with their powerful configurations and devices whose processing power, working memory and storage capacity is, to put it mildly, mind-blowing. On the other side, there are the software developers that are trying to keep up with the current progress of the powerful hardware. But when we try to combine these two things and have them communicate with each other, things tend to turn out differently than planed since the software cannot take full advantage of the hardware. This, of course, made many users dissatisfied and when assigning blame, it is perfectly logical to start with the one thing that enables this communication – the operating system.

In Windows 7 a lot of attention has been dedicated on the multiprocessing. This operating system has become fully aware of the demands of the software and system packages and it is doing the best it can to distribute the numerous tasks to the available cores. If, for any reason, one part stops functioning, the task is transferred to the available one (remember the WARP technology we discussed earlier?). The guys from Apple went one step further. Instead of focusing on how the operating system will deal with the powerful software and the ever powerful hardware, they have decided to enable a different kind of working environment. This environment helps software developers develop their applications in a way that the applications guide themselves into the many cores and processors without constantly engaging the operating system. It is a fact that up until now, developers could not develop an application that will be aware of the multi core environment and use its power in this way. There was a good chance for an error to occur while distributing the tasks of the cores. Because of this, developers worked on developing applications that will perform the tasks one at a time. Apple has been kind enough to introduce in its newest operating system the Grand Central Dispatch (GCD). GCD is a technology, first of its kind, which has been developed to allow developers to squeeze out the last drop of power from the hardware.

As we said, this technology has been incorporated into the newest OS of the Apple and whenever you install software that has been developed with the GDC technology, all of the tasks are defined by the GDC and the operating system is for the most part bypassed.  This is a revolutionary approach that involves the introduction of a completely new system of dealing with applications, but in order to truly believe this we need to wait for a while and see if the skeptical developers will accept and implement this idea into their applications.

Networking is one of the most important features of an operating system. In a world that begins to resemble a global village, it is important for a user to easily connect to a wire(less) network and start using the resources of other interconnected components, or the benefits of the Internet. We saw in Vista how networking should not be realized. Windows 7, then again, is a living witness of how to realize this important aspect in computing.

We wrote on numerous occasions about the easy way of becoming part of the network in Windows 7, but we are taking the liberty to mention this fact one more time. Apple, on the other hand, does not concern itself much with how much has the time improved for the user when connecting to the internet or joining an existing network. They have only announced, rather coldly, that whoever uses the Snow Leopard will be able to connect 1.5 times faster than the time needed in one of the previous versions.

Since battery is the heart of every mobile computer, we should pay special attention on this factor when purchasing an operating system. You do not really need all the bells and whistles if they drain the power of the battery and leave you empty handed in less than half an hour. In Windows 7, due to the millions of reasons we mentioned on several occasions (few processes running, small system kernel, and system that is fully aware of the energy consumption), the life span of the battery has been increased, even 15% more than the Vista installed computers.

On the other hand, all of the Mac notebooks have batteries with capacities that allow several hours of uninterrupted work, so it is not really necessary for the software to be optimized to consume less energy. Why save when we have plenty?

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Tags: apple, energy saving, gdc, mac, microsoft, multiprocessing, netbook, networking, notebook, snoe leopard, software, vista, warp, win 7, windows 7