Ok, so i'm tweaking with my OS, and i opened up msconfig. I noticed that under Number of Processors, it shows I have 16. I only have an 8-core processor. What would happen if i chose 8 or 16? Would i get a faster boot time?
Check also number of threads as sometimes say 1 processor has 2 threads (or more) but Msconfig records this as nr of processors. So sometimes a 1 core 2 thread processor is shown as 2 cores
Cheers
jimbo
You would make your system (not much) slower if you limit the number of threads. It certainly would not reduce boot time.
Intel likes to market threads as cores (or even "processors") but considering practically no software makes use of it, it is all marketing fluff. That is why after Spectre/Meltdown you can disable multi-threading with no noticeable degradation in performance. Usually.
There's no marketing trick. That Ryzen has 8 full cores and 16 threads that use idle time in one core to make work on another task at same time so no processor time is wasted. That appears as 16 processors to a OS and programs.
You can leave Number of processors in msconfig unchecked with no bad effects. Performance will be same.
You have 8 physical cores with 16 logical cores. Pairs of logical cores share quite a bit of CPU hardware and are reported to Windows as separate cores. It is not like having 16 physical cores but it is better than 8. How much better depends heavily on the workload.
By default Windows will use all available processors. The option is provided to limit the number of processors used, primarily for testing and diagnostic purposes. Post people will never have no use for this or the other boot options.
By default the "Number of processors" dropdown will show 1. But unless the checkbox is checked this number will be ignored. Maybe Microsoft should have set this to the actual number of cores. It would have made no difference in performance but would have avoided much confusion. There are many Internet articles that get this wrong.
Also the options here are in effect for the entire session, not just during boot. They are called boot options because of when they are set, not necessarily what they do. Many names had to be chosen in a short time and there wasn't time for a lot of discussion. Sometimes names are not very descriptive and easily misinterpreted.
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