Windows XP 32bit home edition w/ 8 cores?

zankuto

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Aug 24, 2010
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I think the answer is already no, I need xp professtional.
But can anyone tell me if a 8 core bulldozer or a Phenom II X6 would work with Windows XP 32bit home edition?
 
Solution
Microsoft redefined the terms for their operating systems. They don't count cores, but rather "CPUs". You can't run the Home versions on a system with more than two CPUs. As far as I know, those CPUs can have as many cores as you like.

I would upgrade to Windows 7 64 bit, rather than stick to XP 32 bit, though.

compulsivebuilder

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Microsoft redefined the terms for their operating systems. They don't count cores, but rather "CPUs". You can't run the Home versions on a system with more than two CPUs. As far as I know, those CPUs can have as many cores as you like.

I would upgrade to Windows 7 64 bit, rather than stick to XP 32 bit, though.
 
Solution

Mathos

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Works just fine :sol: I know from first hand experience having a 1090t and running a dual boot with Win7 x64 for newer things, and WinXP Home for older things that won't run on I Vista/7 let alone on a 64bit OS (still likes to boot up Sid M's Alpha Centauri, and Vampire Bloodlines every once in a while).

And my experience has been that the scheduler on XP works better than Vista/7. Vista/7 thread scheduler keeps constantly bouncing threads between inactive cores playing hell with performance if C&Q is enabled, and for whatever reason won't let me set proper affinity on single threaded games and apps. In fact on Win7 so far, I've yet to see the turbo function work, except for rare glimpses of one core going up to just about 3.5ghz a couple times while watching AMD overdrive numbers.
 

compulsivebuilder

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Morbid curiosity? :D


Perhaps XP provides all the functionality needed, and the user is happy in 2GB of RAM, but needs a brutal amount of processing power? There are some applications which don't need much RAM, but benefit from having a large number of simultaneous threads. Putting those threads onto lots of real cores will result in higher performance.

Perhaps the application won't run on Vista / Win7 without invoking "compatibility" hacks?

Perhaps the OP is taking a moral stance against paying any more money to Microsoft?

There are plenty of possible reasons.