At a special joint press conference held by Microsoft and Intel on Tuesday, the two companies displayed how Microsoft's upcoming Windows 7 update works in the most advantageous combination with new hardware and features for Intel's line of 32nm processors.

Talking about energy efficiency, encryption speeds and the performance of multi-threaded tasks, the companies said that the improvements made to Windows 7 operating system will speed up applications on computers with Intel's multicore chips, thereby bringing about enhanced overall system performance and lesser power consumption.

The companies elaborated that the Windows 7 OS has been so designed that it can boost application performance with the breaking up of tasks, like video encoding, for concurrent implementation over multiple cores and threads.

Among some other core changes that Microsoft has made in Windows 7 include improved power management of cores on Intel's chips; power savings for increased battery life; new onboard instructions for Advanced Encryption Standard (AES); and use of Intel's on-chip virtualization technology for running Windows XP-compatible programs.

Commenting about the Microsoft tie-up, Ruston Panabaker, Microsoft's principal program manager, said: "We were able to go with Intel through the planning, development and readiness of Windows 7. What we have learned over time is to focus on the responsiveness of the system for the task the user is doing is more important than a benchmark or raw performance."