XP Home Duo Core Support?

[rkoenn]

I have a dual Athlon 64 in a machine at home right now, my first build of such. It is for a customer. I got the initial XP install but shut down the machine prior to reboot as it was getting late. What I am curious to find out when I get home is how does XP home treat the dual core CPU? Is it going to identify and use it as a dual core? You don't need XP Pro to have this functionality do you? I will find out this afternoon but was curious if anyone knows before the big test later today?

 

[bwatson283]

I will never telll.... 🙂

 

[rkoenn]

Just for everyone's information I found a forum website using a google search on this subject. One of the respondents actually showed the task manager and computer properties windows in his post and they showed XP Home identifying the dual core processor and the task manager showing 2 processors. I will learn for certain later this afternoon but that looks like XP Home does give full support to dual cores.

 

[stash]

Yes it does.

 

[Rilex]

Microsoft has a per-socket policy on their products (for most, if not all?).

So, in theory, you could have a Clovertown running under Home and get all 4 cores.

 

[InlineFive]

Originally posted by: Rilex
Microsoft has a per-socket policy on their products (for most, if not all?).

So, in theory, you could have a Clovertown running under Home and get all 4 cores.

Right, so Home can use one-socket but Professional can use two-sockets.

 

[rkoenn]

While I know the licensing policy covers sockets I was still uncertain if the underlying code would support the dual cores. It is apparent from the post on another forum that MS wrote the code to support dual cores as if they were two independent CPUs whether in one or two sockets. In reality a dual core is basically a two CPU processor, just parked on the same silicone with a few common I/O related circuits. I would have to wonder though if the kernel code in XP Home would truly support a quad core in the future.

 

[Aluvus]

Originally posted by: rkoenn
While I know the licensing policy covers sockets I was still uncertain if the underlying code would support the dual cores. It is apparent from the post on another forum that MS wrote the code to support dual cores as if they were two independent CPUs whether in one or two sockets. In reality a dual core is basically a two CPU processor, just parked on the same silicone with a few common I/O related circuits. I would have to wonder though if the kernel code in XP Home would truly support a quad core in the future.

All of the important guts are exactly the same as XP Pro, which people run on 4 core systems already, without incident.

Home is essentially just Pro with a few things turned off. It isn't anywhere near as different as people would have you believe.

 

[stash]

The kernel in XP (and Vista) isn't entirely optimized for dual-cores. They're just too new for that. For instance, if one core has data in its on chip cache, the system will not always recognize that, and the second core will grab that data out of memory and put it in its own on chip cache.

This does NOT at all mean that Vista does not support multi-cores, but it sometimes isn't entirely efficient. That said, I don't know if any OS has a more efficient multi-core implementation yet.