The need for speed in operating systems is never-ending.

In the newly released FreeBSD 7.0, speed is a key improvement with gains of up to 1,500 percent at high load utilization over its predecessors in the FreeBSD 6.x branch.

While performance improvements are a key aspect of FreeBSD, it's not necessarily the most important new item in the free open source operating system.

"What is most important depends on what you want to do, of course," Michael Lucas, FreeBSD contributor and author of Absolute FreeBSD, told InternetNews.com. "The performance improvements are quite astonishing and are what most people will notice first."