Intel Plans for Dual-Core Prescott CPUs in 2005

scapermoya writes "X-Bit Labs is reporting that Intel is planning to step up their introduction of dual-core processors, with the first chips to hit the market in late 2005. Intel announced this plan at the Technology for Business Today seminar, held in Washington, D.C. Looks like NetBurst is sticking around, despite what we have heard lately about a move toward the 'M' architecture. Supposedly, thanks to HyperThreading, the OS will see 4 installed processors. Snazzy."

Comments

Re:Windows Licencing

[Morgahastu]

Windows XP only supports 2 procesors so it's likely that it wouldn't install on a machine with 4 visible processors.

You'd have to turn off hyper threading to get down to 2 processors. Who needs 4 processors in a non server environment anyway? It's annoying enough having two processors with one barely getting used since most apps are not multi processor away and Windows XP being quite dumb about load balancing.

I wonder if you can turn off hyper threading for the install and then turn it back on after you've run XP once, would it notice the extra processors and cease to work or would it see the 4 and not do anything, after all it's not like your changing mother boards so it might not notice enough to trigger the licensing check.

I don't see a need for hyper threading one dual core chips. It's redundant.

Multi-Processor boards

[Apocalypse111]

I am curious what the maximum number of processors that WinXP supports is, or for that matter Longhorn. The reason I ask is because, with this technology, seeing 1 proc as 4, then logically it would see 2 proc's as 8. 8 processors? Sounds a little rediculous, but how exactly would XP handle it? Will we have to wait until SP3 or something? Would it see only 4? Would you have to turn of hyperthreading? Will there be boards built to support multiple processors with this new chip type? The more and more I think about this, the more I think this is a distributed computing project in the works. And please, no jokes about Beowulf clusters...