It’s no secret that I’ve been left struggling to come up with a Windows 7 killer feature. I think I might have found it, and it comes in the form of lower power consumption.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Windows 7, a lot. I find it a huge step up from Vista in terms of performance, reliability and usability, but I’ve been struggling to find that killer Windows 7 feature. But could the lower power consumption that Windows 7 combined with Intel’s upcoming Westmere CPUs offers be the killer feature.
Lower power consumption isn’t a sexy feature, and if you’re on a desktop system hooked up to a continuous supply of juice it’s not something you’re likely to worry about. However, if you spend any time on a notebook away from a power outlet you’ll know how important being able to squeeze a few extra minutes out of a battery can be.
Microsoft has made some significant kernel changes to Windows 7 to improve power management of cores on Intel CPUs (it’s no secret that Intel and Microsoft work very closely indeed on some technologies). By being able to precisely control the clock speed of cores on Intel’s upcoming Westmere 32nm processors (desktop CPUs are codenamed Clarkdale while notebook processors carry the Arrandale codename) Windows 7 can squeeze more life from a system than one powered by Vista.
