Multicore Licensing in XP Embedded

With the advent of dual-core processors (and with even more cores on the way – Intel recently announced an *80*-core processor they hope to have in production within 5 years), I imagine some of you are probably asking how product licensing works.  Some software licenses call out a maximum number of processors they’re licensed to run on, whereas others more generally talk about being installed on just a single computer (traditionally with just one processor).  Multicore processors start to make this line a little blurry, because effectively each CPU core is a separate processor.

The good news for Windows XP Embedded customers is that having a multicore processor in your computer shouldn’t affect this licensing at all.  Microsoft’s general policy on multicore processor licensing was announced last year in this article: https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/highlights/multicore.mspx .  Basically, any piece of software that is licensed on a per-processor model will continue to be licensed as such, regardless of how many processor cores the processor contains. However, Windows XP Professional (and by extension, XP Embedded), is licensed per installation (i.e. the entire computer) and will support up to two processors regardless of how many cores exist on each processor.

Of course, when in doubt, you can always ask your OEM or legal department to interpret the license agreement.

 - Matt

Comments

• Anonymous
  October 20, 2006
  With multicore processors becoming increasingly common, questions naturally arise regarding licensing