Microsoft is currently testing a brand new performance-enhancing feature in Windows 11.
Microsoft, too, is introducing something to Windows 11 called “low latency profile” and it this will work irrespective of the processor, be it AMD64 CPUs like Intel or AMD or ARM64 ones like from Qualcomm. Essentially what this new tech will do is apply a maximum available clock frequency boost for a very small span of time, like for one to three seconds, when a user launches any app. The idea is that the app launch time will reduce while the quick clock burst should not impact the overall efficiency of the system by much.
↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin
Unsurprisingly, boosting the processor’s clock speed to its maximum for a few seconds will make a menu or application open a little faster. I’m not entirely sure why anyone seems surprised by this, but here we are. Yes, the Start menu will load faster and applications will be ready quicker if you boost the processor to its full potential, but that does raise the question of why Windows 11 would need to do that just to open a menu or load an application in the first place.
According to Microsoft’s Scott Henselmann, who defended Microsoft’s approach (weirdly enough he did so on a nazi platform called “Twitter” that I’m obviously not linking to), every other modern operating system does the exact same thing, pointing specifically to macOS and GNOME and KDE on Linux. He also pointed out that the Start menu today does a lot more than the same Start menu back in Windows 95, including making network requests and rendering everything in HiDPI.
I just want a cascading menu of stuff I can run and don’t want my launcher to make network requests, but alas, I guess I’m old.
Anyway, I don’t know enough about the intricacies of how modern processors work to make any statements about how this affects battery life, but instinctively, you’d think this would not exactly be conducive to that. I also wonder if this will trigger a lot of laptops to spin up their fans whenever you open the Start menu, because the few seconds your processor goes full tilt raises its temperature just enough to make that happen. Once this new feature comes out of testing and is generally available, I’d be quite interested in seeing battery tests, as well comparisons to other operating systems to see how it fares.
The “JavaScript” fluff aside…
I’m surprised they were not already doing this. Even Linux back in the day was discussing using higher priority for interactive tasks. (Though not as drastic, and to be fair with better algorithms)
Basically on a desktop operating system, you want the OS use maximal resources to respond to user input. Key press, mouse click, menu popup.
Windows adding real time priority to Start Menu popup is not surprising, again the surprising part is them doing it too late.
Meanwhile, Haiku OS on a single core 2006 potato boots in five seconds and launches menus so fast your mouse hasn’t even finished the release movement before the menu pops up.
Manipulating hardware is not the way to make up for shitty, bloated software.
Morgan,
No kidding.
Windows 11 is painfully sluggish at times. Preemptively ramping up the CPU clock speed might in fact improve performance, but it doesn’t really excuse things becoming so slow to begin with. I never wanted the start menu to connect to the internet, but even if that’s what they want to go with the local CPU should absolutely not be a bottleneck there.
When a software company like MS does development on latest gen computers, it turns into a crutch. The performance experienced by average users is only going to be worse. Believe it or not, I think we’d see much more performant software from microsoft if their developers were made to daily drive and optimize for older machines. This way when end users run the software, the performance experienced on average machines would actually go up rather than down.
My old Pentium 75 opened the start menu in 1/4 of a second and 3 clicks of the hard drive.
When I upgraded to 32MB of RAM, once cached, it would open without any clicks of the hard drive silently.
(yes, I know the start menu was less complex, but not 1500x times so)
Haiku is indeed incredible. Unfortunately, I can’t daily-drive it. I love the aesthetics and how snappy everything is.
Edit: +1 on “yea, I really don´t want the start menu to do anything really”
Show me my apps, don’t query the web. If I want to do a web search or search for files, I will launch a dedicated program for that. ffs all these small things make the laptop battery life halve.
Colour me puzzled.
Isn’t this supposed to happen with any processor since the old mobile athlons supported on-demand performance mode?
FlyingBoats,
It would be interesting to profile the start menu and see what the frequency graphs show before and after the change!
The linux ondemand governor may not work the same way as windows…so there may be differences but it gives an idea of the concepts anyway:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.14/admin-guide/pm/cpufreq.html
The governor doesn’t really know how much CPU a task is going to need so it works by sampling loads and adjust accordingly. By default, linux ONDEMAND samples the CPU load on 10ms intervals and if it’s greater than 95%, then it bumps up the frequency to max.
Assume a sudden load increase occurs… 5% of the time it will randomly be within 0.0ms – 0.5ms of the 10ms sampling window. There will be a ~9.5ms latency until the governor processes the sample and bumps up the speed. 95% of the time the load increase will happen in 0.5ms – 10ms of the sample window. There will not be enough load to trigger the governor until the next sample window, which begins about 4.5ms later on average. However the next sampling window also has to elapse in it’s entirety, so we’re probably looking at 14.5ms latency average before the governor bumps anything up.
Additionally this all assumes the load increase is actually a sustained 100%, but if for some reason the task blocks, like networking or IO then several sampling windows might come and go without crossing the 95% CPU activity threshold. I’m not sure about this but I believe these thresholds are per core, so if a task is blocked on a daemon running on a different core, it might spend too much time waiting and fail to trigger the governor.
So between latency and thresholds, we can make hypothetical arguments for why an ondemand governor would be less performant than a task that immediately calls for higher CPU frequencies. All this said though I still feel there should be more than enough CPU even in low frequency states to open start menus without latency on a human scale. – it’s just a case of poor optimization. 90s devs would fix this optimizing the task to require fewer cycles, 2020 devs fix this by throwing more CPU and electricity at the problem. Fortunately it’s all the same with modern software engineering and there are no cons with the latter. :-/
Opened my Windows 10 start menu, realized how laggy it was.
Removed the Weater tile I never cared to get rid of before.
The start menu now opens/closes 10-20ms faster.
So about 1 frame faster ?
I am so happy that window managers without Start (or similar…) menu exists.
I’d rather they just turn off the Windows Compatibility Telemetry that seems to being eating up CPU cycles anytime I look in task manager to see why my computer is studdering.