If you have a quad-core CPU with eight logical cores after Hyper-Threading, you have probably noticed that the Performance tab of the Windows 7 Task Manager really struggles to display real-time graphs of per-core utili ation. It tries to squee e in eight, time-on-the-x-axis charts in a small hori ontal window. Now imagine what it would look like with two CPUs and 16 logical cores, or four CPUs and 32 cores — or, as Microsoft details in its latest Building Windows 8 blog post, 160 logical cores (pictured above).
As you know by now, Windows 8 will revolve almost entirely around the new Metro-style Start screen — except for the new Task Manager. There’s one very good reason for this: the Metro interface isn’t designed for apps with mega-data density. Over the years since Windows 95 was released, the Task Manager has steadily grown into the go-to place for general system debugging, for both consumers and power users alike. This isn’t a bad thing, but but as it has become more useful, its data density has increased. We’ve already covered most of the changes being made to Task Manager in Windows 8, and now it seems that its improved layout and heatmaps are coming to logical processors too.
Basically, each core will now be represented as a block with its current utili ation displayed as a percentage. No graph, no hori ontal space constraints, just a beautiful, heatmap-like grid (image above). Not only does this massively increase the at-a-glance functionality of the Performance tab — you can actually compare cores! — but you can now hover over a core to see its logical ID, too. This interface gracefully scales up to 640 logical cores, Windows 8′s maximum. It also looks like the “Set affinity” dialog has been spruced up a little, too, to make it easier to assign processes to specific processor.
Windows 8 Task Manager: Good news if you have more than 1 CPU
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