If anyone is interested in help getting either WinUAE or AROS running on Virtual XP for Windows 7 please feel free to email me (on here) I will be glad to help out with anyone's questions as I have been using this configuration for months..
Also there are two big differences in Windows 7 and Windows Vista that would make a big difference in OS speed and chipset integration with the OS.. When you read this you might think oh wait BIMMER (you all do know what the BIMMER was right? :-) , Amiga Custom Chipset..
The Windows 7 kernel has been redesigned:
The redesigned dispatcher lock in the new Windows 7 kernel improves performance. The lock was single and global in previous Windows versions, which will become a bottleneck in a massively multicore system. The newly designed the lock has a "tiered" approach, so the fine grained locking mechanism wouldn't create too much blocking. That'll enable easy scaling to 256 cores. (I'd look for 256 core cpu's in the not so far future by the way)..
second feature directx compute (using the GPU as a general purpose co-processor):
""With the introduction of Windows 7, the GPU and CPU will exist in a co-processing environment where each can handle the computing task they are best suited for," wrote Chris Daniel, product manager for software at Nvidia. "The CPU is exceptionally good at performing sequential calculations, I/O, and program flow, whereas the GPU is perfectly suited for performing massive parallel calculations."
Microsoft is doing its part by putting DirectX Compute in Windows 7, so that developers can make better use of the GPU for tasks other than just graphics acceleration. Having the GPU pitch in where possible will help take the load off of the CPU so that it can focus on other tasks. The ideal end result of this is that the PC should be more responsive thanks to efficient use of processing power.
Daniel gives an example of how a GPGPU could speed up a task: "With new software designed to take advantage of this capability you would be able to copy and transcode (convert a video from one format to another – a very computationally intensive task) a movie to your MTP supported portable media device up to 5 times faster when using the GPU as a co-processor with DX Compute, as compared to only doing the processing on the CPU."
Microsoft also natively supports GPU acceleration with a new Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center for H.264 video content, most of which is encoded in high-definition formats and typically more taxing on the CPU.
"Parallel programming is the next big thing for the world of computing – it has started already," said Daniel. "DirectX Compute will accelerate this discontinuity by enabling massive parallelism to the masses. What we are talking about is co-processing— essentially using the right tool for the job."
source Tom's Hardware US
http://www.tomshardware.com/usI personally would like to see WinUAE supporting both DirectX Compute, DirectWRITE APIs, and support parallelism as much as possible..
To all the Mac folks who want to remind me about OpenCL, developers have to take advantage of this by calling api's themselves, where as this capability is already more built-in with quite a bit further OS integration.. So that's where the differences are. It's interesting that Apple's bootcamp drivers are slower running on "pure" Apple intel hardware, than the same pure intel hardware on an INTEL branded motherboard.. I will have more info on that shortly, I think it's possible that Apple is trying to skew the benchmarks on their own hardware when it runs windows just to say they have a performance edge..