Lemon, that business of Win7 using the cores is very interesting. Thank you. I'm getting ready to build a new box and one of the decisions was whether to load WinXP or Win7. I'll hold off on the project until the first Service Pack for Win7 is released and then load it.
I've been using Win 7 for about a month, and I have to say that it is superior to both XP and Vista. I was a Vista fangrrl for a long time, but Win 7 is just so much of a step up, it's incredible. With the exception of the mistake I made installing Civ, I have had zero issues with 7. Something that I can't say about either XP or Vista. Don't delay, my friend. You won't be sorry.
@Lemon Merchant
Unless the code is designed in concurrent way (and can run more than a single thread doing anything sensible, using lock free structures will be a bonus
) no operating system may ever help. Switching between the cores when scheduling the threads is trivial and it may help cooling the processor down but getting real performance won't happen. Some other processes may use the cores simultaneously but that's all.
Well, I'm not the biggest code genius, and I certainly don't understand all of the nuts and bolts. I can only speak to what I know from experience, and some research. Civ is definitely a single core app, and having more cores doesn't really make it faster from that perspective. Vista seems to allocate one core specifically for Civ, and the rest of the cores do the housekeeping chores. This does produce a
small performance improvement, notably a reduction in turn lag, and leaderhead load. The machine is also able to handle larger map sizes without bogging down.
It's fairly easy to test this sort of thing. My former room mate tested his old single core Athlon against his proud new Phenom purchase last year (Using XP). He set the clocks the same and with the same amount of RAM, and he moved the graphics card to and fro between them. (He's an engineer, so this sort of thing is a big science project for him. Knowing him, he probably still has all of the data hidden away somewhere.
) Then he played some saves. (That's where I learned the test technique.) He did measurements and everything, and there was a definite performance increase in having more cores, though it was admittedly small. Then he played a full game on each machine, using a large map. He thought that a huge map would be too resource consuming and skew the tests in favor of the quad core. Again, a small performance increase in the form of reduced turn lag. The "camera" feature of Civ was a little smoother to both of us, but that is a subjective measurement he discounted.
So, ok, big deal, right? The bottom line is that having another, or more, cores takes the load off of a single core machine running Civ. My Phenom is clocked at almost 4 GHz (3.95), so all of this is moot for me, but if I clock my machine at the same speed as the highest you can over clock your mono core, my machine
will outperform yours. I don't gamble, but if I did, I would put money on it.
I'm not arguing your points on multi threading, and all of that. I have no doubt that you are completely correct in that respect. Heck, I'm not sure I even totally understand multi-threading. I haven't been able to find out the big theory behind Microsoft's retooling of the kernel for Win 7. They only say that it has been optimized to use the cores and memory more efficiently. Maybe the reason is for cooling, as you say, I don't know. Some talk on the Windows forums and blogs suggests that Win 7 outperforms XP by a significant margin, when running the same apps on a machine that dual boots 7 and XP. I dual boot, but haven't tried it yet as I don't really care (and I'm too lazy to do all of the reinstalls needed. Yawn...).
All I can say is what I said earlier. In my personal experience, Civ seems to run better and more smoothly on Win 7 than it did on the same hardware using Vista, and that makes me a very happy girl.