A nicer UI trick would be to change how Windows Task Manager reports CPU usage on the "Details" tab, because with, e.g., 64 virtual cores, single-threaded process CPU utilization can only ever be 00, 01, or (assuming the display rounds up) 02, because the displayed value is
sum of core % utilization
-------------------------
number of cores
In a system with hundreds of cores, (predominantly) single-threaded processes' CPU utilization will therefore appear to be identically zero.
The "Processes" tab improves on this slightly by adding a single decimal digit, but this display still becomes less and less useful as core count increases because its precision remains inversely proportional to the number of (virtual) cores in the system.
Chrome changed their task manager to make the CPU percentages be relative to a single core instead of relative to the total CPU power available. This makes the numbers more comparable (100% on one machine is roughly the same as 100% on another, regardless of core count) and it avoids the problem of increasingly tiny numbers. Microsoft should follow that lead.
This change means that Chrome's task manager can show CPU usage percentages that are higher than 100%, but that is fine. The percentage is simply the percentage of a logical processor that is being used and 200% means that two logical processors are being used. Simple, easy to understand and explain.
macOS's Activity Monitor, and the task manager on Ubuntu (forgot its name, something like System Monitor maybe?) when in “Solaris mode” do sum of core % utilisation without dividing by number of cores. So a single core at 100% shows up as 100%, four cores at 100% shows up as 400%.
For a weird trick, change the decimal symbol and the digit grouping symbol to the same value in the Region settings in the old Control Panel. Then everything always uses 0% CPU :)
Works with the current 1:1 assumptions, but then the early windows performance problems with ryzen's NUMA design shows what happens when those assumptions are wrong. Their design, while less cool, is capable of handling pretty much any configuration.
