If you are a low-level, bare-metal type of SQL Server geek, you will probably enjoy watching this 60 minute webcast by Microsoft’s Madhan Arumugam and Fabricio Voznika. It has a lot of interesting and useful information on how Microsoft was able to scale up beyond 64 logical processors to 256 logical processors on Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 R2.

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 introduces support for greater than 64 logical processors, supporting up to 256 logical processors on the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system. In this webcast, we discuss the importance of being able to scale to 256 logical processors, examine the methodology Microsoft employed to validate performance and scalability of SQL Server 2008 R2, and provide details on SQL Server scalability tests and the hardware platforms the tests ran on. We also discuss architectural innovations that made it possible for SQL Server 2008 R2 to scale beyond 64 logical processors and share SQL Server best practices.

This webcast was originally aired on December 9, 2009, so it is pretty recent.