Microsoft's Ryan Haveson takes to the Building Windows 8 blog today to give us one of our first looks at a Windows 8 feature not included in the Developer Preview: new Task Manager features drastically increase its usefulness on multicore systems, especially on servers with large numbers of logical processor cores.

Rather than the old, graph-based approach, the Windows 8 Task Manager now displays CPU usage in numbers and colors - more heavily loaded processors are darker colored, while lightly used processors are lightly colors. Hovering your mouse over a particular processor will give you its logical processor ID. All of this makes it easier to tell at a glance what each of your logical CPUs are doing, especially in systems with as many cores as the one shown above.

 

The new Task Manager also allows users to specify which logical processor or processors should run a particular process - one could, for example, restrict a browser or video encoding program to use only one or two of a system's cores, leaving the rest free for other tasks. This feature was also available in previous Windows versions, but the dialog boxes are more informative here.

For more, as always, check out the deeper and more informative post at the Building Windows 8 blog.

Source: Building Windows 8 Blog

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  • darunium - Thursday, October 27, 2011 - link

    too bad it looks like it doesn't nicely relay thermocouple info.
  • tony95112 - Thursday, October 27, 2011 - link

    This machine has 160 logical cpus, a terabyte of memory - but only 3 disks and two network interfaces.

    That display would become rather cluttered for a database machine with a few hundred disk drives and a dozen network interfaces. Perhaps they need to apply the same trick that they used for cpus and just show a shaded grid for those too?
  • bertomatic - Thursday, October 27, 2011 - link

    Those disks are probably, 1 local array for host os, and a couple SAN connectectd arrays, so it could be thousands of actual disks. Those two nicks are probably 10GbE, or better yet, LACP teams of 10x10GbE each. with 8x$5000 processors and a TB of ram, doubt they skimped on disks and nic's.
  • tayb - Thursday, October 27, 2011 - link

    I think they do have the disks separated to an extent. If you look at the image it shows multiple drive letters next to each HDD and all those labels on the left side look like buttons. I bet if you click them it brings up advanced info.
  • bertomatic - Thursday, October 27, 2011 - link

    i thought the 28xx procs were 2p max, and the 88xx procs were the 8p chips. Is this a cluster of 4x2p systems?
  • sanguy - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link

    I think the wrong model # is being displayed, and these are E7-8xxxx series.
  • Wardrop - Thursday, October 27, 2011 - link

    Is process affinity being touted as something new? We've had it at least since Vista, where you can set what logical processor(s) should be used for a particular process
  • silverblue - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link

    It's in XP. :)
  • Mr Perfect - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link

    What I would like to know is if the OS remembers a program's affinity settings now. When dual cores where new, there where some games that didn't like getting bounced around between CPU cores. Every time one of the games launched, I had to rush to get the affinity set in task manager before the game crashed. That was back with XP though.
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