Windows 7 SP1 Released, Available for Download

[saaiello]

If you are up to date with everything it was only 83MB download for Win 7 Ultimate 64-bit.

 

[hardcore_gamer]

[citation][nom]livebriand[/nom]Is this a beta or the full thing?[/citation]
I think its the full thing.

 

[Wish I Was Wealthy]

It's finally out,this windows 7 SP1 & I will not be downloading it...Although I will be bumping up a new computer that I will be making soon & I intend to use windows XP Pro SP2 x32 bit retail boxed edition on a Gigabyte H55 board with a core i5 680...That will be used to replace this one that is not mine,but a borrowed pc to go onto sites like these & others...

 

[hangfirew8]

[citation][nom]jprahman[/nom]Well AVX is a new instruction set that Sandy Bridge processors support as well as the upcoming Bulldozer CPUs. Basically AVX lets you perform as many as 8 floating point mathematical operations per instruction, which can give some pretty significant speed improvements to programs that use AVX.[/citation]

Ah, OK. It's like AltiVec... a decade later.

 

[Wish I Was Wealthy]

To Twist86...Maybe I should try windows 7 x64 instead...If you did not have that many issue's then maybe it is for me also,but I will see if I can afford another computer first since I am bumping up another XP based pc within a week first...

 

[Wish I Was Wealthy]

To HangFireW8...I thought that all those instructions where built into the operating systems & where not added to by downloading updates...

 

[pcfxer]

You people are retarded. AVX does NOT depend on the APPLICATION. It depends on the COMPILER (mostly the linker, at least that's where I'd do it).

 

[jprahman]

Not entirely true. Yes compilers can automatically take take advantage of AVX instructions when compiling, but it is difficult for that kind of auto vectorization, so hard in fact that it is still an active area of research. In reality without the programmer using intrinsics or inline assembler AVX may not be included in the program at all. And then there's the issue of CPU dispatching, where you have to check if the OS and CPU support AVX and then select the AVX code path. It not nearly as simple a selecting a compiler switch.

As to the operating system support. The reason why previous versions didn't support AVX has nothing to do with the instructions being built in to the OS. The problem has to do with context switches between threads. When the operating system switches from one thread to another it first has to save the state of the first thread. This means that the first thread is paused and then the contents of all the registers must be saved to memory and then the second thread's registers are then loaded from memory and then the second thread is restarted. That a little simplified, but that's basically what happens.

The problem stems from the fact that the the operating context switching code didn't save the state of the AVX registers between context switches in the past. If you used the AVX registers in Windows 7 before this update what could happen is that you would have data in the AVX registers and then a context switch would happen, your data wouldn't be saved and the other thread would screw up your data. Then your thread would resume and you would continue using the data in the AVX registers that was corrupted by the previous thread. Congratulations, you just corrupted data.

 

[jerrspud]

does the service pack included the Activation Exploit update?

 

[JohnnyLucky]

I got an automatic update notice at 2:39 AM local time. Took what seemed like forever to download and install.

 

[Guest]

I can't update. I get an error message. Tried deactivating Firewall then AV but still can't do. I'm afraid I'll have to reinstall win7 and try upgrading from scratch... Suggestions are welcome!

 

[Camikazi]

[citation][nom]jprahman[/nom]You do realize that this update is required in order to use AVX instructions. That's a pretty big deal.[/citation]
It's not a big deal if you don't have Sandy Bridge or Bulldozer CPUs 😛

 

[aaron88_7]

Anybody else having trouble installing this? Spent 4 hours yesterday with this apparent 83MB file taking forever to download, oddly enough before downloading it it lists it as being between 70-800MB....as long as it took to download I'm guessing it's really the latter.

Finally got it downloaded today...but now I'm on my 2nd install after the first fubared itself after restarting and attempting to apply the updates. Got an error at operation 118458 of 334353, had to restart then run system restore....should be done, (again), soon so we'll see if I get the same problem again.

Fun times....

 

[aaron88_7]

The most annoying part is I got this all downloaded and installed lickity spit on my grandfather's computer. Both are 64 bit versions but mine is Ultimate, his is Home and recently set up so it's relatively new. Maybe I'm not yelling at my computer loud enough, hmmm

 

[jimmysmitty]

[citation][nom]HangFireW8[/nom]Ah, OK. It's like AltiVec... a decade later.[/citation]

Not quite. AVX is a extension on newer Intel CPU and should be out on AMDs CPUs this year. This just adds native support for it in Windows 7.

 

[cpatel1987]

Umm not that I can't look this up elsewhere, but couldn't you, Toms Hardware, have explained the key updates on SP1?

 

[shin0bi272]

I suddenly realized... I dont care about this... at all...