Discussion Win11 - A CPU Monster

[jnjnilson6]

Now this is particularly controversial and there may appear a multitude of differing and intriguing perceptions and points of view.

Sure, on my current machine, the Core i7-12700H does not appear to bear more than 2-4% usage under lighter circumstances of usage, yet there exists the question of what would happen if you do not use your computer only lightly. For example, writing programs in Studio 2022 and having Terabytes of software installed and set up and a lot of software running continually while on the machine there's currently physically performed nothing.

Then, even a 4 core / 8 thread CPU would not mandatorily get the work done well (or at least as fast as one'd prefer). And you would see results on the Task Manager and spikes of percentage which would not look so pretty even while doing nothing (but still having a lot of software in the background).

Even a Pentium 4 ran well on Windows 7. Now, if you somehow manage to install a version of Windows 11 on one of the last Pentium 4s, you'd hardly see anything lower than 80-100% on the Task Manager at all.

It is a compilation of big and badly written software which requires a lot faster machines than those of the past for synonymous things.

Tell me your experiences with heavy usage on Windows 11 and what you think. Perhaps you'd be able to compare the activities you'd performed to synonymous ones on Windows XP, Vista or 7.

Thank you!

PS. I am referring to machines with lesser cores than the i7-12700H. The major question is 'Why should we need to go that high up to be able to get more complex work done?'

 

[hotaru.hino]

I haven't really noticed any difference in how Windows behaves when taxed with something to do. Most times the system is still responsive, just that some things may take a little longer to do.

The thing is, CPU % Utilization is not a measurement of how much the CPU is being used (like how many cores, or how many ALUs in it are in use). It's simply a ratio between if the core was running the System Idle Task or not over a period of a second. Also, Windows employs a priority based queue, and most user tasks have the same priority. So even if you run say Cinebench or Handbrake on it, your other tasks will get their turn. It'll just affect the Cinebench score or increase how long it takes to complete the Handbrake job.

As for why a Pentium 4 is constantly busy when supposedly sitting there doing nothing on Windows 11, it actually can drop below 10%, but lots of things are likely saddled with security and permissions checks, among other things.

 

[jnjnilson6]

I haven't really noticed any difference in how Windows behaves when taxed with something to do. Most times the system is still responsive, just that some things may take a little longer to do.

The thing is, CPU % Utilization is not a measurement of how much the CPU is being used (like how many cores, or how many ALUs in it are in use). It's simply a ratio between if the core was running the System Idle Task or not over a period of a second. Also, Windows employs a priority based queue, and most user tasks have the same priority. So even if you run say Cinebench or Handbrake on it, your other tasks will get their turn. It'll just affect the Cinebench score or increase how long it takes to complete the Handbrake job.

As for why a Pentium 4 is constantly busy when supposedly sitting there doing nothing on Windows 11, it actually can drop below 10%, but lots of things are likely saddled with security and permissions checks, among other things.

Yeah, you're wonderfully right! I was talking about the time-frame which completion of certain tasks would take on dual or quad core processors. It would definitely be aggravating; systems with such processors even load folders in Explorer with a little delay which is not pertinent to such with higher-end CPUs. And browsing and simple things like that get lagged-out, especially on Dual Cores with Hyperthreading. A living example would be the i3-8130U (my previous CPU). It takes a lot of time, and some things just veer off into the sphere of delay which draws out a sigh invariably each time it occurs, which is most of the time. The CPU had not performed thusly with lighter software and for lighter use. But when things got heavy and a lot of software got installed and put into use, the experience slowly staggered to a point it was quite slow.

Now, I know it is not a great CPU or anything. But web browsing and opening folders should not be a problem on such a CPU no matter how many Terabytes of data you've got on the machine and that you have installed software in different spheres.

Thank you once again for writing up!

PS. The i3 machine has only SSDs for storage (quite big in capacity and quite fast in speed) and about 36 GB RAM. So the other components do indefinitely surpass the CPU, meaning that the description above would be as best as it gets for that particular type of processor. The same story could be said about another machine I had harboring an i5-7200U on Win10. The i3-8130U and the aforementioned i5 are brothers in terms of performance. Both computers were virus-free and all the software had been installed properly and conscientiously.

 

[CountMike]

W11 has many "Run once and stop" tasks listed in Task manager but not using any CPU cycles unless restarted. Much depends on auto start resident applications. True idle can't exist as windows would shut down but with a minimum of those it can idle at less than CPU 1% usage, Added complication is with Intel CPUs with Efficiency and Performance cores and close to idle tends to use Efficiency cores which have less performance so it may look like it's working harder.
Ryzen has part of it built into CPU algorithm and does it without windows "help" to some extent.

 

[drea.drechsler]

.....

As for why a Pentium 4 is constantly busy when supposedly sitting there doing nothing on Windows 11, it actually can drop below 10%, but lots of things are likely saddled with security and permissions checks, among other things.

I have to think even a hyper threaded P4 Northwood would appear slammed by the indexing, security checks and myriad other activities that go on in Windows 10 and 11 when idle. But most, if not all, of those background tasks should step aside and not get in the way of a foreground application or user interaction with the desktop. Although clearly not designed for it I know Win10 is very fluid and smooth using it with an AM3+/FX6300 platform; arguably better than a P4 but unarguably a far cry from even the weakest of modern 4-core desktop processors.