So why am I excited to have a surface?
My current company Laptop has an extend life time and is a Windows XP Pro SP3 from 2002 running on duel core Intel Centino with 3GB RAM. As an OS goes XP has been very successful, it has survived over 11 years, but now it’s getting very old and there are a number of apps that I cannot develop on it, in fact in about 1 year from now Microsoft will stop producing security patches for it. It takes 2min 45 seconds to get from a cold start to the login and another 3 minutes to after login before I can start working.
My new Surface has a smaller screen than my old laptop that now begins to look more like something that belongs in a museum. The surface is less than half the thickness and weighs a fraction of the weight with a start up time that is practically instantaneous. But unfortunately it cannot replace my development environment because it runs on an ARM processor which also means all apps must be downloaded from the AppStore. So I checked out the Microsoft shop for the new ultrathin windows 8 notebooks but they had all sold out. But it is still a very cool device
But even though my old laptop may seem slow and old, I think it might be possible to install Windows 8 on it. Microsoft has done a lot of work over the last 10 years to make a leaner and faster OS. So if my old laptop belonged to me I would try installing Windows 8 on it. I am certain that the speedup will not be due to Moore’s law but rather a more efficient implementation of an OS.
So what makes this better than say an iPad?
Well because it is a windows machine it can be added to an AD domain making single sign on possible. When I edit a power point-slide I don’t need to use a third party SaaS tool that streams from drop box, which means if I am serious about security I cannot do this with PowerPoint presentations with sensitive data. Instead I can directly edit my power-point slide in a secure and user friendly way via a native app (office). In fact, because it is Windows it is just going to work seamlessly in a Windows environment. The Pro version of surface uses Intel processors, meaning that there is a good chance that most of the apps that currently run on my old laptop will probably work on my new one. The WinRt version of surface uses a reduce version of Windows 8 to optimize power consumption. Since this does not run on an Intel processor my old apps will not work on it. But for most business users this is not a problem.
Why would I expect my old Laptop to perform significantly better with Windows 8?
Several years ago at the PDC Microsoft had some presentations about Moore’s law. To correctly interpret this law you need to know how it is defined http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
“Moore's law is the observation that over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years.”
The density of transistors is already down to the atomic level and has reached a physical limit for several years. This means that the “free lunch” is over and in order to make use of the processing power of an integrated circuit you can no longer take the easy way of programming sequentially instead you need to go asynchronously. Because Moore’s law is scoped to an integrated circuit it has been able to survive by just adding more cores on the same integrated circuit and bringing everything closer together. This law won’t hold up much longer because of the space available, the cooling needed to prevent such tiny circuits melting which also limits the clock speed. So coming back to why will my old laptop performing significantly faster on Windows 8: Microsoft has restructured there code eliminating layers of inefficient code that has built up over the years and has stripped this down to a single layer that sits directly on the metal called WinRT (Windows Run Time) not to be confused with Windows 8 RT! Also Microsoft has stripped a number of processes making the overall operating system much faster and worth the effort to upgrade.
Over the last 4 years Microsoft has made a lot of progress in tooling for high performance programs. This ranges from things like the async await syntax in .net 4.5 that significantly simplifies asynchronous programming from something like a rocket science to something mortal programmers can do. To making super computer power available in Azure. To make use of computing power you really need to understand what your application is doing with computer resources, is it CPU, memory or io bound. What is the latency and speed between resources etc. There are lots of technology that can be applied (HPC, MPI, OpenMP, Hadoop, ATL, GPU) but you need to invest time to understand what the problem that is to be solved and plan how to use which technology to solve it. In other words the free lunch is over, to make useful applications these days you need to know something about software engineering
