Analysis: Microsoft’s Windows 11 Performance Claims (Premium)

Yes, Windows 11 seems like it’s just Windows 10 with a refreshed UI. But Microsoft is also making changes under the hood. And in a video that it just posted, the software giant explains why those less visible updates will result in a more performant version of Windows. Naturally, I’m wondering why these changes aren’t coming to the 1.3 billion people currently stuck using Windows 10, a system that is otherwise identical to Windows 11.

Microsoft vice president Steve Dispensa discusses this and a number of related Windows 11 topics in the video. Here’s a breakdown of the changes he discusses, with commentary.

Security and the Windows 11 hardware requirements

This is really the first version of Windows conceived for a zero-trust and hybrid world.

At first, I thought he was dithering on the zero-trust explanation for Windows 11’s controversial hardware requirements. But the word “hybrid” there is just about working from home and the reality of COVID and post-COVID era work.

Consistency vs. efficiency

A big theme for Windows 11 is consistency.

Windows 11 is perhaps a bit more consistent than Windows 10, but it still has most of the same inconsistencies that users have been complaining about for years, thanks to the archaeological-like layers of technology that persist from version to version, and often over a period of decades.

For users, we focused our design efforts on removing the distractions you face as you work to make it easier for you to focus with the new modern interface and refined aesthetics. One of my favorite updates is the new way to arrange your Windows as you work with Snap Assist, where we give you several guided screen layouts to choose from. And once you make a selection, you can quickly choose which windows go in each area.

Snap Layouts is a great feature, but that has nothing to do with consistency. And the problem with removing “distractions,” of course, is that one person’s distraction is another’s much-needed feature. I will cite the lack of Taskbar options for the millionth time as a key example.

And then something that’s particularly important for hybrid work, when you need to physically move around and undock, the windows on your monitor will minimize to your laptop. And when you re-doc, everything is back where you had it before on your monitor, which saves you time as you work from anywhere. These capabilities and more place the focus on really keeping you in your flow.

Again, this has nothing to do with consistency. This is really just about new features that help you work more efficiently. Which is absolutely a big deal.

Also, please move beyond the term “flow.” All it does is invoke menstruation.

Windows 11 for IT

Tor IT, we’ve made a lot of incremental improvements that are designed to fit like a glove into your existing management tools and processes.

The phrase “incremental improvements” should resonate with IT.

The Zero Trust security model is baked in with layered security from the silicon on the board itself to the actual boot process, your log-in as a user, and the apps that you use in your Windows session every day.

This is the most controversial thing about Windows 11, but placing it in the context of IT is smart since most organizations will simply move forward with Windows 10 for as long as they can anyway. Don’t worry, we return to this topic later.

Performance

A big shift in how we deliver the Windows experience with better performance in Windows 11 is how we deal with prioritizing apps and processes. Under the hood, we’ve done a lot of work in memory management to favor the app windows you have running in the foreground so that they’re prioritized with more CPU and other system resources. This also carries forward when you launch an app under load.

At this point, they show a demo in which the CPU is pegged at 90 percent load in Task Manager. But subsequent app launches, of Microsoft Word and Excel, are “super fast,” and the CPU load never exceeds 90 percent as it would normally. As with all of the under the hood improvements in Windows 11, one wonders what prevents Microsoft from fixing this problem in Windows 10 as well.

Despite the heavy load on the CPU, both apps launched as they normally would without any lag. And that’s because these processes are in the foreground so they get more compute resource. That’s seconds of time saved in this case. And the time savings add up as you use the apps over the course of your day.

This same concept actually applies to the Windows shell itself, the browser, and your open tabs in Windows 11.

Maybe the cause of the recent reliability problem in Windows 11 was that Microsoft was giving priority to an advertisement over the shell. But I digress.

He moves on to sleeping tabs, which is a Microsoft Edge feature that is not unique to Windows 11, so we’ll skip over that for the most part.

All of these optimizations combined from the OS and apps, as you can imagine, also equate to longer battery life.

Fair enough. But Windows 10 users would love longer battery life too.

Resume vs. cold boot

Take your phone for example. you rarely switch it off and back on, as that forces a cold start. Instead, it stays on in connected standby and it’s instantly available the minute we interact with it. And so just like with your phone, Windows 11 has an optimized instant-on experience as your PC resumes from sleep. In the sleep state or S3 mode, your RAM stays energized so it still has power while most other components are powered down. Now, when you resume from sleep, two things happen. First, we’ve optimized calls to hardware components that need to power on for better overall memory management. And at the software layer, we’ve reduced starvation across key processing threads so that power is preserved for the threads that really need it. This approach optimizes resume from sleep by 25 percent. So for most people, resume will be almost instantaneous. It also means that your device can stay in sleep state longer and not hibernate as often.

Sounds great. Again, it’s unclear why only Windows 11 is getting this optimization.

[Windows Hello login being noticeably faster is] due to code optimizations that we’ve made. In fact, we’ve seen up to 30 percent speed-ups in Windows Hello for business logins.

Again. You get the idea.

Disk footprint

We’ve reduced our disk footprint [in Windows 11]. To do this, we’ve done a few things. First, we’ve expanded the use of compression technologies.

A little more detail here would be nice.

Second, for non-critical inbox apps and components, things like Sticky Notes, or To Do or Power Automate and others, their default state is actually a stub. So for example, if I launch Sticky Notes for the first time from the start menu, you’ll see the loading Sticky Notes modal pops up, and then the rest of the app binaries are loaded on demand without any compromise in functionality. Now doing this reduces size on disk, and you’ll also see less background update activity and download traffic.

That’s rather incredible given that those apps can’t possibly take up a lot of disk space. I’ll also point out that this is the same company that will not let users determine which parts of Office to install from their Microsoft 365 subscriptions, and that when pressed it explains that the disk savings would be minimal and don’t warrant the complexity of that functionality.

Separately, we’ve also reduced the disk consumption caused by the OS itself and the browser caches.

Again, zero explanation of what that even means.

Windows 11 hardware requirements and performance

The requirement for Intel 8th Gen and AMD Ryzen 2000 series and newer chipsets does definitely contribute to performance. But the main rationale here was actually to balance security with performance. Security is at the core of these requirements. In fact, Dave Weston has an upcoming show on Microsoft Mechanics where he’s going to cover this in great detail. So definitely go check that out.

But a couple of quick things.

First of all, with Windows 11, we’ve moved to a single 64-bit architecture using UEFI-based firmware and there are security benefits from that alone.

This doesn’t require 8th-generation Intel Core chipsets.

And we’ve also focused on reliability. So supported CPUs use the new Windows DCH drivers, and [they] are supported by our [PC maker] and silicon partners.

DCH drivers have been a requirement for Windows 10 since late 2018. And from what I can tell, DCH drivers do not require 8th-generation Intel Core chipsets either. Given that this is a requirement for Windows 10 drivers, too, I’ll also just point out that Windows 10 is supported on much older hardware.

With these new chips and the driver model, we’re now seeing a 99.8 percent crash-free experience in the preview.

It’s unclear how or why using DCH drivers with older Intel (or AMD) hardware would adversely impact reliability.

If you look back at the first time Microsoft used this number, in late August, you can see that the reliability rationale went like this: “[PCs] that do not meet the minimum system requirements had 52 percent more kernel mode crashes [and PCs] that do meet the minimum system requirements had a 99.8 percent crash-free experience.” What’s not mentioned there, and I think this is purposeful, is what the “crash-free experience” was for PCs that did not meet the minimum processor (and/or TPM) requirements. My guess is that it was pretty damn close to 99.8 percent because there is literally no difference there that could impact reliability.

Application compatibility

[Your Windows 10 apps] absolutely will [just continue to work in Windows 11]. Because it’s a continuation of the same underlying platform, your Windows 10 apps will continue to work in Windows 11.

Given all the talk about the changes that were made specifically to Windows 11, one again wonders why the improvements in this continuation of the platform can’t also be made in subsequent versions of Windows 10, which are also, wait for it, a continuation of the platform. I know. Dead horse.

We’ve done a ton of testing across thousands of apps. And the experience of moving to Windows 11 is really comparable to moving to a new Windows 10 feature update.

Yes. Yes, it is.

Servicing model

[Things change in Windows 11], and in a good way. We listened to feedback spanning [from] individuals to large organizations, and almost everyone agrees that an annual feature update model works best. So Windows 11 will be updated with a single feature update [major version upgrade] per year.

Woah, woah, woah. That is not what almost everyone agrees to.

What we all agree to is that the Windows as a Service (WaaS) model, in which Windows received two major version upgrades every single year, was far too unreliable and disruptive. And while I think that most would thus agree that one major version upgrade per year is “better” than that, that’s a really low bar. Most individuals probably don’t want major version upgrades every year, and most organizations absolutely do not want this.

We’ve also simplified the servicing plan to make it easier to plan for. Home and Pro editions of Windows 11 will get 24 months of support for feature updates, while enterprise and education editions will see 36 months of support.

In other words, it will be possible, but probably not easy or seamless for anyone to remain on any one version of Windows 11 for two or three years, depending on whether you’re an individual or a business.

Aside from the improvements to the update timeline, the monthly updates themselves have been optimized in a bunch of ways.

So if you’re in IT, first of all, just to be clear, you’re existing update management processes will continue to work. And there are even a few more granular controls that we’re building. But most of the optimizations have been made to the update engine in Windows, which improves the way updates are packaged. Now, when an online update is offered to Windows 11 machine, the process compares what’s already available on the computer and it only pulls down the necessary pieces from the update source location. And this approach reduces update sizes by around 40 percent.

You know, we’ve been talking about delta updating since Windows Server 2003, and it blows my mind that Microsoft could make that kind of improvement here in 2021 and not backport this to Windows 10, given that there are 1.3 billion people currently suffering from overly-large and unreliable updates every single month right now. This is reminiscent of the move from Windows 7/8.x, when Microsoft finally made cumulative updates a thing but didn’t backport it to the previous versions of the OS, dooming those users to never-ending update processes.

Aso, we’re making the update process less impactful to users. Active hours is now on by default and it uses AI to determine the hours when you’re away from your PC so that updates are applied during those times.

From here, there is a bit about enterprise deployment and servicing that isn’t all that interesting or relevant, given that nothing has changed with Windows 11.

Look, these changes are mostly good news, and while those moving to Windows 11 will face a bit of a learning curve thanks to the simplified UI, the under the hood changes are a net win. We should celebrate that, I guess.

But the arbitrary Windows 11 hardware requirements—and it’s increasingly clear that’s all they are, arbitrary—mean that these benefits will only be provided to users who have purchased a new PC in the past two years or will do so soon or in the future. There is absolutely no reason for Windows 10 users not to get most if not all of these improvements too, especially when you consider how often Microsoft states that the two platforms are essentially identical. This feels like an attempt to force upgrades, helping PC makers and Microsoft’s bottom line as the PC buying frenzy of the COVID era dies down. And that’s a shame because it casts a shadow over the release of Windows 11, a product that should energize and excite the user base, not drive suspicion and angst.