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Comment by kchoudhu | Hacker News Reader

How does Windows 10 licensing work for this number of cores?

Honest question: do people who need 64 cores use Windows? I assumed these types of workstations and workloads are 99% Linux based.

IIRC windows's scheduler wasn't as good as linux's at managing these kind of paralel workloads.

Yes, we do :) Well, maybe not 64 cores.

In embedded/automotive, majority of the tooling does not have a linux version. Compiling is a bitch. Still, you're probably right about the 99% comment.

Maybe for rendering workloads one could make use of that many cores on a Windows PC.

Windows Server?

AFAIK, Windows isn’t limited by the number of cores, but the number of physical CPUs. Home and Pro allow 1(?) CPU, but Server you pay per CPU.

Although, I’m not sure how the 64 cores are presented to the OS. If they’re presented as, say, 2 32 core CPUs, Windows will complain.

Windows does "weird things" with high core counts, I don't remember the exact number but when I had a high cored machine before it presented as "2 cores" in the second numa zone and the remainder in the first.

like: zone1: 62 cores, zone2: 2 cores

the OS was also rather unstable.

Windows 7 [something] definitely allows for more than 1 CPU. I mistakenly configured KVM to show 10 CPUs with 2 cores each instead of 1 CPU with 10 cores with 2 threads each, and it definitely showed more than one CPU in the task manager (and less than ten).

I believe you need the windows 10 “pro for workstations” edition

Edit: according to this, the normal windows 10 pro edition would suffice. I feel like I’ve read conflicting things though, so take it with a grain of salt: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10...

Same as always? Win10's license isn't restricted by cores, that's usually the domain of their server OS's and software.

There used to be limitations on Windows regarding CPU count and maximum RAM size. With a consumer-level OS, you could not run more than two processors, for example. Given how earlier Ryzen acted like it was actually a bunch of NUMA nodes in the past, this could pose a problem (the normal version of Windows 7 wouldn't allow for a NUMA setup, you'd need Pro for that).

I don't think Windows 10 has this limitation anymore but it's a very valid question. Given their weird calculation for the number of licenses you need to run Windows server, it's probably good to be cautious about licensing weggeweest it comes to running Windows on high performance chips like Threadripper.

> There used to be limitations on Windows regarding CPU count

There still is. And the Threadripper is just one CPU, so you should be ok.

With pro edition of Win 10 there should be support for up to 2 CPUs, with whatever amounts of cores they have.

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