Vista and AMD X2

Now, say I am doing something processor intensive, shouldnt only one core be going like crazy, the other just slowly plodding along like normal? I am making a copy of a DVD I got for christmas (3 seasons of Star Trek), but I am watching the cores in a Vista sidebar gadget that monitors both cores seperatly (they already have a quad core version of that gadget!), and it is saying both cores are running almost at full power, in about the same up down pattern.

Is there a setting somewhere to enable seperate core operation or something like that?

It's the windows scheduler; it stumped me too...more info here.

Well that is just stupid. The point of dual cores is to divide threads, so if one thread is intensive, the whole system dosent bog down. Is it just me or did M$ just make a dual core cpu pointless? It just uses the extra core for more power, rather than multi-thread operations.

Oroka Sempai said:

Well that is just stupid. The point of dual cores is to divide threads, so if one thread is intensive, the whole system doesn't bog down. Is it just me or did M$ just make a dual core cpu pointless? It just uses the extra core for more power, rather than multi-thread operations.

Click to expand...

Programs which are designed to take advantage of SMP, such as Photoshop and MSSQL server will realize significant advantages while using a muticore/processor system (despite the scheduler). Single-threaded apps will not really notice any difference, even though they're bouncing around from core to core.

Of course, if you're running multiple programs at once (multi-tasking), multiple cores/processors will be an advantage as well...

So when everything else is idle, a single thread program will bounce from core to core, but when there is another program running, then they will share the cores, they wont both bounce around the cores?

Oroka Sempai said:

So when everything else is idle, a single thread program will bounce from core to core, but when there is another program running, then they will share the cores, they wont both bounce around the cores?

Click to expand...

From my meager understanding of the mechanics of the scheduler, it will determine which threads will be allocated to which core(s) at a given time. In other words, they'll both bounce around. I don't see a big problem with this, however, as the performance hit given modern systems is likely negligible. More knowledgeable folks may rightfully gainsay this, however...

that is kind of pointless. I have 2 ACPI systems running multithreading.

One is a dual P3 running win 2k

the other is my new core2duo laptop running XP

Both of my machines will load one core for the intensive process, and leave the other core alone,.. mostly some times it will load it about 50% depending on if Im running it in the background or not. If its running in the background it tends to keep one core mostly free for multitasking, if its running in the foreground It will utilize as much power as it can since it is the main process.

If vista wont even multithread properly then there is another reason I will never touch it, on top of the fact that its interface is way to bloated, it requires too much resources and disk space and I just hate the visual style.

My mothers 1ghz machine could barely run it when I beta tested.
I dont see a point in M$ making a resource intensive OS. As far as im concerend the OSes should be getting less resource hungry and more efficient not the other way around. There is no point in wasting all that power that could be being used for other software.

It makes no sence to me.

Skeith- I couldn't agree more... OS'es are just getting way to bloated.. you'd think they start writing better code and making them less power hungry, but nope... leave it to microsoft lol

That type of scheduling seems to make sense to me. With the current scheduler (used in WinXP) you have a single process goes to a single core. This would work out OK if you're running a lot of apps with none of them really maxing out the CPU. On the other hand, if you have a single app that would max out one core (prime, F@H, most games) then you have one core at %100 and the other doing very little. At least by alternating cores a CPU intensive application that isn't already multithreaded will show some improvement from the second core.

It's not surprising that was the method MS went with. Without having prior knowledge of the software that's going to be used on a machine it's pretty hard to come up with a scheduler that will show optimal performance in all cases and the one being used in Vista seems to be the best compromise. While they probably could have added more flexibility to the scheduler (using alternate algorithms in alternate scenarios) at some point it just adds more overhead instead of increasing performance. I would expect the above method to possibly be implemented when quad-cores become the norm. Possibly using a single core for the kernel and process scheduling and the other three cores for application use. But that's just speculation on my part.

Skeith said:

that is kind of pointless. I have 2 ACPI systems running multithreading.

One is a dual P3 running win 2k

the other is my new core2duo laptop running XP

Both of my machines will load one core for the intensive process, and leave the other core alone,.. mostly some times it will load it about 50% depending on if Im running it in the background or not. If its running in the background it tends to keep one core mostly free for multitasking, if its running in the foreground It will utilize as much power as it can since it is the main process.

If vista wont even multithread properly then there is another reason I will never touch it, on top of the fact that its interface is way to bloated, it requires too much resources and disk space and I just hate the visual style.

My mothers 1ghz machine could barely run it when I beta tested.
I dont see a point in M$ making a resource intensive OS. As far as im concerend the OSes should be getting less resource hungry and more efficient not the other way around. There is no point in wasting all that power that could be being used for other software.

It makes no sence to me.

Click to expand...

What makes you think that windows XP handles your dual core any differently? It works fine...you really think Microsoft would make a new OS that can't use more then one core correctly when within 2 years or less (who knows...not me) most/all CPU's will be dual core.