New features are planned for introduction into Windows 8 Beta, and Microsoft offered a glimpse of an enhancement testers can expect in the next major public development milestone.
The new Task Manager will sport new capabilities in Windows 8 Beta compared to the
Developer Preview release, streamlining management of in excess of 64 logical processors, according to
Ryan Haveson, a group program manager on the User Experience team.
Even as it released Windows 8 Build 8102 Milestone 3 (M3) Developer Preview to early adopters, Microsoft was hammering away at Builds of the operating system leading up to the first Beta.
Members of the Windows team are already dogfooding Windows 8 Builds compiled after the launch of the Developer Preview, and testing some upcoming features.
One improvement related to Task Manager just “showed up in our daily builds,” Haveson
revealed on October 27, 2011, promising that “you will be able to see for yourself in the future, in the Beta release.”
The evolution of Task Manager better equipped the tool to help server administrators and customers using mega-PCs to deal with large number of logical processors, no less than 160 in the particular case highlighted by Haveson.
Enhancements in Windows 8 Beta Task Manager come to make it easier for users to
compare CPU real-time usage, deliver a better view over processor activity and making it easier to find the chip ID.
In Windows 8 “it is now easy to see all the logical processors at a glance and know which are being utilized to high and low capacity,” Haveson said.
“In the new CPU graph, you can also get the logical processor ID that maps to each entry via a tooltip, by hovering over the entry with the mouse.”
“A major benefit of a heat map is that it scales really well to large data sets. The new Task Manager will show as many logical processors as the OS supports.”
Customers with machines leveraging multiple processors will be able to use Task Manager in order to associate a specific process with the CPU they want. This can be done by locating the process in the list under the Details Tab, and selecting ‘Set affinity’ from the right-click contextual menu.
Windows 8 Developer Preview Build 8102 Milestone 3 (M3) is available for download here.
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