Hardware Requirements and System Hardware Support
Processor Support
Processing support in Windows 7 is designed for modern 32- and 64-bit processors. Processors that do not meet minimum recommendations may still be able to run Windows 7, but with some impact on features, performance, or stability. To enhance the performance of Windows 7, Microsoft has built-in support for several enhanced processor configurations.
- Processes and Threads
- Program instructions are typically grouped into units of code called threads
- Threads and processes are common terms used to describe what the CPU is working on
- Multitasking
- Gives the appearance that the computer is running multiple applications or processes at the same time
- Preemptive multitasking
- Allows a single process to be interrupted by another process, even if the first process has not completed
- Quantum: time window a thread is allowed to run
- Processor affinity: the thread is restricted to which CPU can run it.
- Windows programs are usually written modularly
- Code modules are saved in Dynamic Link Library files (DLLs)
- Code modules in the DLLs can be shared between applications
- Multiple Processor Support
- Multiprocessor systems
- Have more than one physical CPU
- Each additional CPU allows the computer to process instructions in parallel, at the same time
- Hyper-Threading Support
- Hyper-Threading
- CPUs have extra hardware built in to allow more than one thread to be processed at the same time on a single CPU
- Each thread runs in its own virtual space
- Multi-Core Support
- Threads created by applications can limit themselves so that only one thread can execute
- CPU cannot use its extra hardware
- Multi-core CPUs
- CPU package physically looks like one CPU
- But internally contains multiple CPU cores
- Each CPU core is capable of running its own thread
- Cores share some connections to the rest of the computer
- Performance may suffer
Read more about multi-core technology at: http://www.intel.com/multi-core/