pheasant16 said:
Haven't built for a looooong time.
Trying to work with video on an old P4 circa 2003 chip doesn't work.
Do have a more recent AMD AM3 triple core that helps some, but still slow.
Know with XP I'm limiting myself to about 3 gigs of RAM; but just
wondering will XP see the 4 cores and let the processor work as designed?
I do have a couple unused copies of Windows 7, but would prefer to
load XP on a new build if it would let the new hardware work as designed.
Thanks for the help.
Mark
The license terms changed a bit after Win2K.
On Win2K, at least my copy of Win2K Pro, the limit is two cores,
no matter how sliced. You can have a dual socket motherboard, with
a single core processor in each socket. Or, you can have a single socket
motherboard with a dual core processor. If a quad core was present, two of
the cores would be ignored.
On WinXP, they changed to sockets. WinXP Home supports one socket. As
far as I know, you could stick a 10 core processor in a single socket and
that would work. On WinXP Pro, it supports two sockets. If you used
two of the 10 core processors, that would be 20 cores total. I expect
there is a core limit in there somewhere (either Affinity representation
or Task Manager performance graphs, there could be another practical limit
present). But in a quick search, I can't find an answer. It could be a
32 core limit (constrained by implementation perhaps).
On Windows 7, it's spelled out more fully. Still effectively
socket count based, but with upper core count stated (in case
you were lucky enough to own some Larrabees).
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/system-requirements
Windows 7 Starter, Home Basic, and Home Premium - One motherboard socket
Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate - Two motherboard sockets
Windows 7 32 bit OS has 32 core limit, 64 bit OS has 256 core limit.
So doing the math, I could buy a dual G34 AMD server motherboard, put
a 16 core processor in each socket, and use Windows 7 Professional 32 bit,
giving me a 32 core machine fully usable.
On WinXP Pro, I expect the same sort of thing might work. Years ago,
I found a picture of Task Manager, with a *lot* of graphs in it,
and it's possible that might have been a 32 core limit as well. I
tried to find that picture later when I needed it (for comic relief)
and couldn't find it again.
OK, using this as an example, the WinXP "Set Affinity" dialog, has
room for 32 cores. So a couple G34's would probably make all the
little tick boxes available here, with WinXP Pro and its two socket limit.
http://www.online-tech-tips.com/windows-xp/set-processor-cpu-affinity/
Summary - WinXP Home or WinXP Pro will easily handle Ivy Bridge. I'm
assuming they call the Xeon version of Ivy Bridge, something else.
Processors with Hyperthreading, count that as twice as many cores.
Which isn't really that advantageous. So if you had a six core with
Hyperthreading on each core, the core count is 12. Still not enough
to collide with the apparent 32 core limit. It's possible one of the
$4000 Intel processors with 10 cores, that could have Hyperthreading,
and then you might have an issue. But if you can afford a couple
$4000 processors, you can probably afford to spring for a new OS.
BTW - in terms of the "new OS Olympics", you find people saying things
like "Oh, the newer OS always gives better performance". I've been seeing
some disturbing things lately, like just a few hours ago running Windows 8.
In Audacity, I asked the program to do a particularly lengthy calculation.
Initially, the dialog box said "will complete in 3 minutes". Three minutes
later, the program was reporting it was "not responding", which is
normal for Windows 8. I went out in the kitchen, and made a snack,
came back and it was still dragging its ass. So, on a hunch, I used
the "Set Affinity" dialog, which is a bit more hidden in Windows 8,
and set the program to use one core. The progress meter leaped forward,
and then stopped moving again. On a second hunch (call me a race track
gambler...) I bumped the priority from normal to above normal (i.e. one
step higher priority than the default). The stupid thing finished whatever
it was doing, almost instantly.
Color me, *not* impressed.
I've seen disturbing things in the other OSes as well (processes crashing
out on WinXP, when OS limits are not being surpassed), but this example
in Windows 8, takes the cake. I've never had to "push the damn thing with
a stick" like that before. I'm sure you'll be happy enough, with WinXP.
The scheduler in Windows 8, is undoubtedly clever. I don't know what it
was doing in this case. As far as I know, the Audacity code is
single threaded, and should only have been running on one core.
All OSes like to bounce tasks around, and my dual core with shared
L2, it should have made no difference (they can bounce all they like,
and there's only a relatively tiny L1 penalty). So I don't know why
the program just blew up like that, under Windows 8. And the program
should have been able to finish promptly, by just running at
normal priority. There was nothing else of note, running at the time.
The version of Windows 8 was the Release Preview.
Paul
