Windows 7 Will Not Ship Until Performance Is Through the Roof
Service Pack 1 was nothing short of a panacea for Windows Vista, and in this context it now falls on Windows 7 to wash away all the sins of the current version of Windows. Vista RTM managed to hit a consistent amount of speed-bumps from software and hardware incompatibility to lack of support and to poor performance. Microsoft has already indicated that Windows 7 would play nice by default with the ecosystem of solutions designed to integrate with Vista. The new promise from one of the Windows bosses, Steven Sinofsky, Senior Vice President, Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, is that Windows 7 will not ship until it reaches a certain standard of performance.
"We have criteria that we apply at the end of our milestones and before we go to beta and we won’t ship without broadly meeting these criteria," Sinofsky stated. "Sometimes these criteria are micro-benchmarks (page faults, processor utilization, working set, gamer frame rates) and other times they are more scenario based and measure time to complete a task (clock time, mouse clicks). We do these measurements on a variety of hardware platforms (32-bit or 64-bit; 1, 2, 4GB of RAM; 5400 to 7200 RPM or solid-state disks; a variety of processors, etc.) Because of the inherent tradeoffs in some architectural approaches, we often introduce conditional code that depends on the type of hardware on which Windows is running."
For more details: Softpedia