The Great Moore’s Law Compensator

Details how Intel’s advances in processor horsepower gets eaten by Microsoft code bloat. Actual tests, in vm and on real hardware.

“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.”