I'm new here, so please bear with me if this post is in the wrong section or place. I am currrently using a Dell Precision 690 with 2 physical CPUs and a total of 4 cores. Win 7 x64 handles this with no problem. I am looking to obtain a new unit with a quad AMD Interlagos CPU with a total of 64 cores. Because there are 4 physical CPUs on board Windows 7 x64 will see and use only half of them. Windows server 2008 will support this system, but it is a clumsy solution for running a number of graphics programs. I don't need to make the switch immediately, so there's time to wait for a public release of Windows 8. My question is this: Will Windows 8 64 bit support 4 or more CPUs on the AMD system? I know it will handle up to 640 logical cores. But, I cannot find anything that states the PHYSICAL processor limit for Windows 8. Would someone please clear up the confusion for me. Thanks.

Windows 8 is a work in progress, nobody really knows what the final version will be like...or what version you will need....but your at the right place to watch it all come into focus....

FYI, I was able to get a w8 VIRTUAL IMAGE to run/function on 1-8 VIRTUAL SOCKETS with 1-3 cores each (its a dual Xeon x5680 machine so only have 24 threads to work with)

I don't own ANY 4-socket mobos so I can't help you with that. I'm going to start to work on a few GPU related things in January-ish (maybe sooner). I'm hoping to be able to test the upper limits of socket & #cores support.

Should be able to report back more then - but again idk if this is even going to help you because its all virtualized.

I started an ESXi 5.0 thread in the virtualization and briefly mentioned this.

I can get W8 to configure and run directly on a single host (not a High-Availability cluster though) with 4-8 cpu sockets and 1-3 cores. It runs & seems to work fine (happy to build one and give you a RDT session into it if you want) but as soon as I try and migrate it into a high-avail (HA) cluster or migrate to a different type of machine (for example 4 sockets, 2 cores per socket total of 8 cores across 4 sockets on a 5600 xeon CPU and then try to migrate that over to a 5500 series CPU i get BSOD and it goes to hell - can't recover even if I try and move same instance back to the orig host).

Don't know if that helps. Seems as though since I'm not even supposed to be running W8 on ESXi5 and it works - you may be OK.

in system properties and task manager it says 4 CPUs (same as it says "two processors" in your P690 in windows 7 this says "4 processors")

hth

Winston and Ivan,

Thanks for your responses. It looks as though W8 in its present incarnation will handle 4 CPUs. I plan to wait awhile before getting a 64 cpu machine. From what I read on the W8 boards W8 is not currently reliable as a primary OS. Software drivers are not yet available and the W7 drivers in the software are not all compatible.