I use NT as my work environment. I am involved in performance studies, under NT (what else?), as part of the ADT group. This group is working to identify and reduce the memory hierarchy costs actually incurred by commodity software. We have some promising results for instruction memory references using several techniques that improve instruction stream temporal and spatial locality. We continue to research new methods to identify poor locality in code or data and methods to improve locality automatically.

https://www.research.microsoft.com/ has more details on ADT