FRIVOLOUS RANTINGS ON THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL MAXIMUM PERFORMANCE ON WINDOWS 7 OPERATING SYSTEM

Warning! You are about to enter highly theoretical zone.

This small article is a result of a late night chat with ChatGPT about theoretical and practical limits
of performance achievable using conventional lithography, so consider it a first collaborative effort of myself and AI.
Also i will try to extrapolate this topic to Windows 7 environment.

If you’re a user of an old operating system, that doesn’t mean you don’t want to have a good system performance.
In fact, you will almost certainly have better performance than in modern Windows 10/11 crap.
Moreover you should understand the following: people always want more, that is why this quick note was born.

Enthusiast from Windows 7 community already made breakthrough by releasing [Windows 7 driver for modern Ryzen CPUs] .
People are even running Windows 7 on [Threadripper machines] .
So, yeah, we are quite modern now and want to continue to utilize the bleeding-edge hardware.

As a Windows 7 adept i understand that our operating system will not run quantum computers.
On the other hand, we are almost at the end of conventional computing as we know it.
That is why i am asking myself a question:

"How far can we go in terms of performance in a Windows 7 environment?". 

Today we can freely use 4nm Ryzen 9xxx and 5nm ThreadRipper 7xxx CPUs without any restrictions.

This is already more than enough achievement for Windows 7 users in 2024. But we’ll dive deeper into the topic.
Here’s an illustrative table dedicated to lithography time-line for better understanding.

Ok, now to ChatGPT answer. To understand potential performance gains I’ve asked it the following question.

Say we have EPYC 9754 CPU as a departing point, which has 256 threads in it and has 100% performance. 
It is made by means of 5nm tech.
Pretend that we already have 0.5nm tech. What approximate performance (in percentage) will have 9754 CPU 
if it will be manufactured using 0.5nm technology?

So, we have a perfected situation when [EPYC 9754 CPU] is manufactured at 0.5nm with the same architecture and perfect scaling.
Estimated Performance Gains according to ChatGPT. Only the most important information.

1] Single-threaded Performance:

Higher clock speeds and reduced power consumption could increase single-threaded performance by 50%-100%.
Combined with potential architectural improvements, single-threaded performance might see 100%-150% gains.

2] Multi-threaded Performance:

Transistor density allows for far more cores, possibly increasing from 256 threads to 512-1024 threads. 
This alone could yield 200%-400% performance gains for workloads that scale well with threads.

3] Transistor Density:

A move from 5nm to 0.5nm represents a 10x reduction in feature size, translating into 
approximately 100x more transistors per unit area. 
This can allow for more cores, larger caches, and additional features.

4] Reasons why 0.1nm process is not possible:

Lithography smaller than 0.5nm, like 0.1nm, 
is improbable within the constraints of traditional computing paradigms.

Quantum tunneling:
At sub-0.5nm scales, electrons freely tunnel through barriers, 
making it impossible to maintain distinct ON/OFF states in transistors.

Atomic scale barrier:
At 0.1nm, we approach the size of a single hydrogen atom (~0.1nm diameter), 
meaning transistors would require control over individual atoms or subatomic particles.

5] Potential solutions to improve performance without changing lithography process:

3D integration of chips, vertical stacking of transistors and 
interconnects will increase density without requiring smaller nodes.

Taking into account the averaging method we can safely say that switching to 0.5nm will give us:

• > 90% boost in single-thread performance
• > 250% boost in multi-thread performance

That is quite good to say the least!

On a personal note, I would like to add that:
Leakage currents due to quantum effects would lead to unacceptable energy inefficiency and heat generation,
making such designs totally impractical. This fact will require to reobserve the cooling system, which is unlikely
because it has never been changed since prehistoric times.

Now back to Windows 7. It is hard to predict about ability of modern hardware to work in Windows 7 environment.
Time will show our options in a very short time. I predict that we’ll be able to use 3nm for sure and 2nm with a grain of salt.
More importantly, I still consider Windows 7 to be a future-proof operating system in terms
of the modern CPUs that run Windows 7.

As people on [my Discord channel] reported, a major breaking point for Windows 7 operating system
will be the implementation of CPUs that need to support Intel’s [x86S extension] , which drops 32bit support.
Such an action could be challenging for Windows 7 because it is not fully 100% compatible with modern UEFI,
even with the latest updates. Although we might see some hacks in while. But, anyways, we’ll see how it goes.

That’s it for today, i am outta here!

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