Microsoft Talks More About Windows 8 Task Manager

A couple of weeks ago, we linked to an in-depth look of the Task Manager in Windows 8 at the official development blog, and this week, the team followed-up to talk a bit more about monitoring your desktop or server with it. While the Task Manager has seemed sufficient in recent Windows iterations, the update coming exposes just how much better things can be.

In the article, Microsoft admits that with the current Task Manager, there’s a lot of information to be had, but it can be difficult to interpret. This is made worse in servers where there will be many more than just 8 or 12 threads. Think 100+. In fact, in the example given, the server being used is equipped with 8x Intel Xeon E7-2870 processors… 10 core offerings, for a total of 160 threads or “logical processors” in total.

Doesn’t sound impressive? It might be worthwhile to mention that each of those CPUs retails for over $4,000, each. Oh, and I should also mention that this server is equipped with 1TB of RAM. Yes, RAM.

What was the point of this news post again? Oh right…

Windows 8 Task Manager

In previous development blog posts, we’ve seen that Microsoft will be making use of heatmaps to show problem areas better, such as cores/threads that are not being utilized enough or programs that are hogging too much RAM (not a problem in this server, I’m sure), and it’s good to see the Task Manager benefit from this also.

While I love the idea of these heatmaps, there’s something about the screen above I might love even more: the fact that there is useful information about the hardware being used. It used to be a chore to find the CPU name in previous Windows versions, or the actual clock speed. Here, we’re given a complete run-down of cache values, the number of physical and logical processors, how many threads are currently being executed, uptime (about time!) and other quick-access information on the left.

I envision this page in the Task Manager alone to come in handy when performing all of the benchmarks we do. We can easier see if our benchmarks are taking advantage of the full CPU as they should, or the memory, and also be able to double-check our clock speed fast without the use of CPU-Z. Overall, a major improvement all around. Cheers, Microsoft.