Computers are getting faster, applications work more easily for us, however, when it comes to interacting with Windows it seems that it doesn’t matter what the guts of our PC are, it always seems to go at the same pace. Is it something exclusive to the Redmond operating system? Is it a bad optimization in terms of hardware or is there a technical reason behind it? We explain it to you.
The normal thing, and by simple logic, is to think that as we have more computational power in a computer, thePrograms consume fewer and fewer resources. However, we often find that this is not the case and that the lack of optimization prevails over other things. Is it about programmers’ laziness or failing that there are a series of decisions at a technical level or unavoidable circumstances that lead to it?
Windows always consumes the same resources as a PC
We must start from the fact that in the current operating systems it is this same and not the applications, which is in charge of managing the different processes and, therefore, they not only decide where they are executed and in what order, but also in which conditions that do so and this is where we enter into two different ways of using hardware resources, both by the system itself and by the applications.
However, there is one that is a nightmare in terms of performance and that turns certain processes into true vampires of the power of our computer, despite the fact that they do not really require that much power to function and that is that a fixed percentage of the capacity is assigned to them. processing. Regardless of whether we have a powerful high-end computer or a modest MiniPC. For example, Windows 11 comes standard with Virtualization Based Security, a feature that provides rather little for home users, but is capable of consuming 5% performance, regardless of whether you’re running an application on a Celeron or a Celeron. Xeon, with the difference in power that this implies.
Why are these measures taken?
In reality, it is impossible to predict the performance that a program will require, since we have to take into account that it will depend on the latency of each instruction and it is impossible to predict it due to the fact that we do not know where it will find the corresponding data. Will it have the information already in the registers or failing that in some level of the processor’s data cache? It must be taken into account that the latency of the processor, measured in its clock cycles, will vary for each instruction depending on the information search period.
Therefore, under this premise, together with the enormous number of hardware configurations that exist, it is perfectly understood that for system processes, an operating system, regardless of whether it is Windows, Linux or any other, takes certain percentages of Fixed usage on processor power. What’s more, this is done on consoles and as the years go by, these percentages of use are cut to give more power to the games. However, we cannot forget that in this case we are talking about closed systems and it is a totally different situation from that of computers.
Additional cores for the OS?
All this brings us to one of the novelties that we have seen implemented in the last two generations of Intel Core processors, although not in all models. We are talking about the so-called E-Cores, which on paper have been designed for background tasks. However, the assignment to them is not automatic. In other words, what the operating system will do is look for, for example, 2% of the power of a core that is free to execute a key process.
The operating system’s way of executing processes in threads for the CPU is similar to finding as much space as possible in a box in which to put things. It will not activate another core if there is still a percentage left in the existing ones. The consequences? Well, despite the fact that the E-Cores are a good idea for this type of task, Windows may ignore it, since in the eyes of the operating system itself, what it has available is a certain number of execution threads, it does not know the power that it provides. contribute each.
