[zik]

Wow. That's surprisingly lame.

[Const-me]

The NT kernel dates back to 1993. Computers didn’t exceed 64 logical processors per system until around 2014. And doing it back then required a ridiculously expensive server with 8 Intel CPUs.

The technical decision Microsoft made initially worked well for over two decades. I don’t think it was lame; I believe it was a solid choice back then.

[immibis]

Linux had many similar restrictions in its lifetime; it just has a different compatibility philosophy that allowed it to break all the relevant ABIs. Most recently, dual-socket 192-core Ampere systems were running into a hardcoded 256-processor limit. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/yes-you-can-...

[arp242]

> Computers didn’t exceed 64 logical processors per system until around 2014.

Server systems were available with that since at least the late 90s. Server systems with >10 CPUs were already available in the mid-90s. By the early-to-mid 90s it was pretty obvious that was only going to increase and that the 64-CPU limit was going to be a problem down the line.

That said, development of NT started in 1988, and it may have been less obvious then.

[rsynnott]

The Sun E10K (up to 64 physical processors) came out in 1997.

(Now, NT for Sparc never actually became a thing, but it was certainly on Microsoft's radar at one point)

[mixmastamyk]

SGI Origin did by 1996.

Though MS ported NT to a number of systems (mips, alpha, ppc) it wasn’t able to play in the very big leagues until later.

I agree it was a reasonable choice at the time. Few were getting mileage out of that many CPUs back then.

[sidewndr46]

That was actually the DEC team from what I understand, Microsoft just hired all of their OS engineers when they collapsed

[monocasa]

I mean, x86 didn't, but other systems had been exceeding 64 cores since the late 90s.

And x86 arguably didn't ship >64 hardware thread systems until then because NT didn't support it.