In message
http://bugs.python.org/issue17914#msg188626
Victor Stenner says

"On Windows, GetSystemInfo() is called instead of reading an environment variable. I suppose that this function is more reliable."

From my reading, and based on feedback from one of my customers, I believe he is correct and that GetSystemInfo() ought to be used on Windows. (It is available in pywin32 win32api.)

The code getting the number of processors on Windows is different between the multiprocessing (Python 3.3) and os (Python 3.5) modules.

multiprocessing (old code):

        try:
            num = int(os.environ['NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS'])
        except (ValueError, KeyError):
            num = 0

os (new code):

    SYSTEM_INFO sysinfo;
    GetSystemInfo(&sysinfo);
    ncpu = sysinfo.dwNumberOfProcessors;

os.cpu_count() is already implemented with GetSystemInfo() in Python 3.5, so this issue can be closed. Thanks for the reminder Mark, it was useful to double check.

If you want to take a look at the source code:
https://hg.python.org/cpython/file/35b7dde7fd53/Modules/posixmodule.c#l16064