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Monopoly Power. Microsoft is company A - the laggard

Microsoft anything likely will benchmark poorly on multicore machines in comparison to other products and this is because of the use of monopoly power.

The last US antitrust case tied Java to the Browser and the Browser integration is what got Microsoft in trouble with the Clinton/Reno administration.

Basically Judge Jackson found that Microsoft managers so feared Java that when they recognized the Netscape browser as a mechanism for deploying Java Ballmer decided to suck the air out of Netscape by integrating a "free" browser into Windows.

Java was built a decade ago with multicore like WoodCrest in mind. It is very hard to develop in Java without creating threads that take advantage of multiple CPUs and cores. I believe WoodCrest has 32 of those. This means 32 threads can be executing at one time. Often I find that I am running more threads than even that. But on X86 machines the threads are polled, not really running symultainiously like on Woodcrest.

So take your Office 7 and benchmark with OpenOffice. Its going to be hard to cost justify Office 7 until Microsoft gets with the threading program.

Its managment has tried very hard to forstall the hardware that will now benefit not only computer users but also the planet. Low power consuming devices, acording to Al Gore in Inconvienent Truth, can take care of as much as 10 percent of the global warming problem.

The more folks that see Gore's film, the more folks will change buying paterns.

Microsoft has been offered help in making its products thread safe and hence low power consumers. Intel tried hard to provide C compilers and other tools to them. But developers have to be aware of coding so that threads can be created. I suspect that is not the case with Microsoft code and the code library needs a lot of work before it is ready to perform on Woodcrest. When you have monopoly power you can use that power to forstall the introduction of products that threaten your core business. WoodCrest is such a product. Lets see.

Frank L. Mighetto CCP.

Posted by: mighetto   Posted on: 06/09/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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