Microsoft has made enhancements to its upcoming Windows 7 operating system that will speed up applications on machines with Intel's multicore chips, resulting in better overall system performance and less power consumption.

Hardware hooks in Intel's new chips will help Windows 7 deliver performance gains when running applications like DVD playback compared to Windows Vista, the companies said in a joint press briefing on Tuesday. The improved performance is accompanied by more efficient power usage, as the OS makes better use of power management features included in Intel's latest chips.

Microsoft has designed the OS to scale application performance by intelligently breaking up tasks like video encoding for simultaneous execution over multiple cores and threads, the companies said. For example, a Microsoft engineer could render a high-resolution image 10 percent faster on a Windows 7 system with a quad-core processor that ran two threads per core, versus a system that ran one thread per core.

More: http://pcworld.com/article/171275/

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