Monday, March 13 12:00 AM ET

Microsoft Releases Dual Core XP Licensing

Redmond , WA - Microsoft announced today that they are ready to take advantage of the industry shift towards dual-core processors. Microsoft has released the new “dual-core licensing edition” of Windows XP. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced the new edition of Windows at a press event today.

“This new edition of Windows will allow our users to realize the benefits of two licenses for each physical machine to make the most of their dual-core processors.”

Windows XP Dual-Core License edition employs a technology known as License Level Parallelism (LLP) which allows for the concurrent collecting of license revenue from a single physical machine.

Ballmer also reinforced Microsoft’s commitment to collecting license revenue from older hardware by announcing that dual-core licensing would be supported on older machines. "The new dual-core license edition supports software emulation of dual-core operation to allow the dual-core licensing to be installed even on single core chips," said Ballmer.

The dual-core licensing edition runs best on actual dual-core processors, but is still functional under software emulation. Hyperthreading can also help this software emulation licensing mode if the processor is capable of that.

For serious power-users the benefits can be stacked as dual-core licensing emulation mode can be run on physical dual-core hardware to yield quad-core licensing, a real boon for Microsoft license resellers.

While the new operating system does not contain any new features, it does allow for users to rest assured that they are compliant with the terms of the new MS Dual-Core EULA. As part of this launch the EULA will get a face-lift for dual core operation and will be promoted under the hip new branding EULA 2.