How Windows 8 Will Deal With Tons of CPU Cores

The growth in processing power hasn't come so much from ramping up the clock frequency, but rather in adding more cores and increasing efficiency.

With growing core counts and technologies such as HyperThreading, Windows' task manager needed to evolve in order to accommodate future hardware. The good news is that a revised Task Manager will be a part of Windows 8. Microsoft's Ryan Haveson, a group program manager on the User Experience team, last month gave a preview of what the Task Manager would look like when dealing with a ton of logical cores.

This is what Windows 7's Task Manager looks like when dealing with a system of 160 logical cores.

The problem with this is that it makes it difficult to do real-time comparisons, partially due to the really small graphs. Zeroing in on a specific core is difficult too, as there is no easy way to get the corresponding processor ID from the graph.

Windows 8's Task Manager changes this by employing a heat map-style to display. This is how Windows 8 will show 160 logical cores:

Processor IDs can be extracted from the graph with just a simple mouse hover. The graph will also scale and display a scroll bar when appropriate. Power users (or regular users who just want to break things) can also assign a processor affinity for a certain process within this task manager. This gives a massive amount of control to the user, but for mostly everyone, this is something that should be left alone.