It’s not exactly news that Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system is a resource hog or that the company’s Office System 2007 makes two pigs in a PC. Exactly how big these porkers have become over time may be less well understood, however, which makes interesting a detailed analysis conducted by exo.performance.network (xpnet).
From a blog post entitled, “What Intel Giveth, Microsoft Taketh Away”:
Given the extended delay of Windows Vista and its accompanying Office release, Microsoft Office System 2007, I was understandably concerned about the level of bloat that might have slipped into the code base. After all, Microsoft was promising the world with Vista, and early betas of Office showed a radically updated interface (the Office “Ribbon”) as well as a new, open file format and other nods to the anti-establishment types. Little did I know that Microsoft would eventually trump even my worst predictions: Not only is Vista + Office the most bloated desktop software stack ever to emerge from Redmond, its system requirements are so out of proportion with recent hardware trends that only the latest and greatest from Intel or AMD can support its epically porcine girth.
You need to give the piece a good read to fully appreciate the point, but here’s a little taste of what’s in the trough.
Combined with an average boot-time image of over 500MB for just the base Windows Vista code base, it seems clear that any system configuration that specifies less than 1GB of RAM is a non-starter with this version. And none of the above explains the significantly higher CPU demands of Office 2007, which are nearly double (73% vs. 39%) that of Office 2003. Likewise, the number of execution threads spawned by Office 2007 (32) is up, as is the total thread count for the entire software stack (615 vs. 370 – again, almost double the previous version).
And the conclusion won’t look any prettier with lipstick.
The net result is that, surprise, Vista + Office 2007 + state of the art hardware delivers throughput that’s nearly on par (~22% slower) with the previous generation of Windows XP + Office 2003 + the previous state of the art hardware. In other words, the hardware gets faster, the code base gets fatter and the user experience, as measured in terms of application response times and overall execution throughput, remains relatively constant. The Great Moore’s Law Compensator is vindicated.
Snort, snort.
