Is windows xp compatible with a quad core?

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Yes it does.

I would check the task manager just to be sure. x4 core would only be beneficial when using intense applications. Some applications are still using only a single core. I do try to tweak options to enable use of "multi-core" graphics and CPU

the maximum memory address that a 32 bit OS can access is 2^32 which is 4,294,967,296.


i think windows xp (32 bit) can utilize up to 32 cpu's (cores).
if you go to task manager, and go to the "processes" tab and select a program that is running and right click, it will give you a floating menu which has a menu item called "set affinity".
if you click that option, you will see



as you can see i have a quad core and therefore the other core selections are disabled.

some older applications are not designed to be able to be mulithreaded and they will not work on a quad core, but in that instance, you can just deselect cores 1 to 3.

I have an Intel i7 (quad core).

I run a dual OS of Windows 7 64-bit and Windows XP Pro SP3 32-bit.

Both run very well, but I haven't explored the XP side to see how it recognizes the CPU (with hyperthreading, the Win7 side sees it as 8 cores).

I'll try to remember to check on this tonight and post up.

Considering the near-Monopoly that MS has on Operating systems, it would be suicide to come out with a processor that couldn't handle it..

that being said, there's 64-bit Operating systems going back to at least XP.

that being said, the apps also have to support dual or multicore processing, addressing, yada, and yada...

64 bit computing has been around longer than people imagine. Intel decided to do 64bit only, whereas AMD decided on a 64bit version that will accept 32bit code.

Where would the world be without AMD?

I checked the hardware configuration on my XP side (32-bit). It recognizes the i7 core (quad core) as having 8 CPUs; just like the Win7 (64-bit) side.

So the answer is YES.

IIRC, XP didn't have much support for multi-core CPUs at first, but they long ago patched it because they weren't uncommon (motherboards with more than one CPU socket) and dual-core CPUs were starting to become more common in production. To make XP compatible, the matter needed to be addressed.

Yes it can, 32 bit and 64 bit are only for RAM I think as with 32 bit you can only have up to 3gb, wheras with 64 bit (I have that with w7) the sky's the limit.... or at least the number of DIMM slots and your motherboards highest RAM capacity.... but you know!

I think Windows fails with Intel.... It can't recognise their processor with HT as actual cores.

From what I remember, there is a Windows 2000 with 64bit capability. I might need to look into that one and investigate.

The RAM limit in 32bit mode can be exceeded by enabling 36bit mode which will open the address space to 64Gigabytes using Physical Address Extension (PAE) With this, Vista could be around for a while yet. Except the one with 8GB RAM limit. That's so low, why did they even bother?