'What Intel Giveth, Microsoft Taketh Away'
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 15th Nov 2007 19:01 UTC, submitted by xpnet.com Research STaff
Benchmarks "'What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away'. Such has been the conventional wisdom surrounding the Windows/Intel duopoly since the early days of Windows 95. In practical terms, it means that performance advancements on the hardware side are quickly consumed by the ever-increasing complexity of the Windows/Office code base. Case in point: Microsoft Office 2007 which, when deployed on Windows Vista, consumes over 12x as much memory and nearly 3x as much processing power as the version that graced PCs just 7 short years ago (Office 2000). But despite years of real-world experience with both sides of the duopoly, few organizations have taken the time to directly quantify what my colleagues and I at Intel used to call 'The Great Moore's Law Compensator'. In fact, the hard numbers below represent what is perhaps the first ever attempt to accurately measure the evolution of the Windows/Office platform in terms of real-world hardware system requirements and resource consumption."
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hardware improvements push down costs
by dabooty on Thu 15th Nov 2007 21:42 UTC
dabooty
Member since:
2007-06-15

not to be an advocate of anything but the hardware improvements did draw down costs of IT in general

back in the day you had to pay a dev years to develop something in assembler and c while nowadays you can use c#, java, python, whatever.

if anything at all, maybe the user experience didn't get any faster, but development costs went down

it's not only because of lazy or bad programmers that bloat went up, it's often because of the reasoned choice for a framework or easier language.

Reply Score: 5

llanitedave Member since:
2005-07-24

"it's not only because of lazy or bad programmers that bloat went up, it's often because of the reasoned choice for a framework or easier language."

To a certain extent that's true: A general-purpose application written in Python takes more resources to do a GUI output task than one coded directly in C.

But I don't know enough to say whether most of MS Office is written in high-level languages, or if it still uses venerable C++.

Reply Parent Score: 1

kaiwai Member since:
2005-07-06

To a certain extent that's true: A general-purpose application written in Python takes more resources to do a GUI output task than one coded directly in C.

But I don't know enough to say whether most of MS Office is written in high-level languages, or if it still uses venerable C++.


From what I understand the GUI of Office 2007 now uses Winforms 2.x rather than the native Window controls.

Reply Parent Score: 3

sbergman27 Member since:
2005-07-24

"""
To a certain extent that's true: A general-purpose application written in Python takes more resources to do a GUI output task than one coded directly in C.
"""

Keep in mind that the Python library doing the GUI output likely *is* written in C. Feel the power of the snake! ;-)

Many of one's common calls to Python libraries are calls to optimized C.

Reply Parent Score: 3

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StuffMaster Member since:
2006-12-26


back in the day you had to pay a dev years to develop something in assembler and c while nowadays you can use c#, java, python, whatever.

if anything at all, maybe the user experience didn't get any faster, but development costs went down

it's not only because of lazy or bad programmers that bloat went up, it's often because of the reasoned choice for a framework or easier language.


I agree. I'd like to know how much bloat is from managed code, non-integration, etc., as opposed to sloppy programming and quality control.

Reply Parent Score: 2