Does Win XP SP3 need dual/multi core optimisers ?

[NoobyDoo]

Does Win XP SP3 needs any app/driver to optimise perf with dual/multi cores ? Like the AMD Dual Core Optimiser ?

 

[ViRGE]

No.

 

[Shining Arcanine]

The short answer is no.

The long answer is a philosophical digression into what can theoretically be done to improve the Windows NT kernel and whether or not it is appropriate to modify the kernel to do it. Microsoft made improvements to the kernel in Windows 7 to make it more scalable, so that it is in theory should be possible to make improvements to the Windows XP SP3 kernel by backporting those changes. There are also other things that are done under Linux, but not under Windows, such as Receive Packet Steering and Receive Flow Steering, which were recently introduced by Google into the 2.6.35 kernel. Those things allow network processing to be distributed across multiple cores, which has the effect of increasing throughput under load and also of reducing latencies. As far as I know, Windows lacks that sort of innovation, which is another area in which it can improve.

It is in theory possible to modify the Windows NT 5.1 SP3 kernel to implement these improvements, but it is technically not legal, because doing it would require violating Microsoft's license agreement. In particular, you would need to violate the sections regarding disassembly and reverse engineering. The average person typically does not have these sorts of skills and you would likely need to be someone in computer science that specializes in operating system kernel design to be able to do them, so the long answer is also no, but with the caveat that illegal improvements are theoretically possible.

Then again, doing this sort of thing would be far more than installing an application or driver, so I probably could have omitted this digression and just said no like ViRGE.