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Mike Toews edited this page Jun 16, 2018 · 1 revision

Windows versions

Which versions are people using?

See Usage share of operating systems

Here are some OS stats from web clients. Figures are percent of all Windows versions.

Source Date 8/8.1 7 Vista XP <XP
Netmarketshare April 2014 13.3 53.7 3.1 28.6 1.2
W3 schools April 2014 15.5 62.3 4.1 18.1 0.1
Statcounter May 2014 19.6 68.7 1.5 9.9 0.2
AT internet Febuary 2014 11.4 61.5 6.7 20.5 0.0
Wikimedia April 2014 15.2 64.0 4.4 16.2 0.2

Here are the percentages of Windows versions analyzed from the Firefox automated crash reports of 8 May 2014 and 20 September 2015.

Source Date 10 8/8.1 7 Vista XP <XP
Firefox crashes 8 May 2014   10.1 61.5 4.8 23.5 0.0
Firefox crashes 20 Sept 2015 11.8 14.7 63.5 4.2 5.8 0.0

The game site Steam has a hardware survey with these numbers for April 2014:

32 or 64 bits? 8/8.1 7 Vista XP <XP
32 + 64 bits 24.8 65.5 3.6 6.0 0.1
32 bits 0.9 13.0 1.2 5.7 0.1
64 bits 23.9 52.5 2.4 0.3 0.0
% 64 bits 96.2 80.2 65.7 5.0 0.0

Steam survey for December 2015:

32 or 64 bits? 10 8/8.1 7 Vista XP
32 bits 1.0 0.6 7.8 0.3 2.2
64 bits 28.8 18.6 35.6 0.2 0
% 64 bits 96.6 96.9 82.0 36.0 0

Gamers tend to have high performance machines, this might also be true for scientists doing numerical computing.

Of 64 bit versions of Windows, 99.7% have Windows 7 or greater:

>>> b64 = [28.8, 18.6, 35.6, 0.2, 0]
>>> print(sum(b64[:3]) / sum(b64) * 100)

SSE / SSE2

What proportion of users have SSE2?

One estimate is from an analysis of Firefox crash reports in early 2012. This showed 4.5% of crash reports coming from CPUs without SSE2. The analysis was likely only for crash reports on Windows machines.

Here's the same analysis at 3-monthly intervals since then:

20120102-pub-crashdata.csv.gz: 4.53
20120401-pub-crashdata.csv.gz: 4.24
20120701-pub-crashdata.csv.gz: 2.77
20121001-pub-crashdata.csv.gz: 2.83
20130101-pub-crashdata.csv.gz: 2.66
20130401-pub-crashdata.csv.gz: 2.59
20130701-pub-crashdata.csv.gz: 2.20
20131001-pub-crashdata.csv.gz: 1.92
20140101-pub-crashdata.csv.gz: 1.86
20140401-pub-crashdata.csv.gz: 1.12
20140701-pub-crashdata.csv.gz: 0.95

More recently:

20150920-pub-crashdata.csv.gz: 0.50

See analyze_crashes.py.

So we appear to be at about half of one percent non-SSE2 Windows machines for Firefox crashes.

The Steam hardware survey has 99.96% of Windows users with SSE2 in April 2014. By December 2015 this figure was 99.99% with 99.93% having SSE3.

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