Nieminen Mika <war### [at] cctutfi> wrote:

>  I wonder how is this done. Unless unix overclocks the cpu without telling
>you... :)

It's quite obvious, if you think about it. Any application on a modern OS must
share the CPU with - at the very least - the OS, if not other applications. In
addition, the application will typically depend on the OS for various services.

The more efficient the OS is in keeping out of the application's way, and the
more efficiently coded the services it offers are, the more time the
application has to do its work.

Windows 95/98 are woeful in that respect - they still have chunks of 16-bit
code in them, which causes a contect switch every time they're called from
32-bit mode.

Windows NT - while a true 32/64-bit OS - still has more overhead than modern
unixes.

So, a good Unix such as FreeBSD or Linux will typically run (compiler
optimisations not considered) the same code on the same hardware faster than
Windows.

-- Chris

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