On 9 May 2012, at 10:42 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: > on 2012-05-09 8:30 Michael_google gmail_Gersten wrote >> >> My MacBook Pro will attempt to only use the physical cores normally, >> turning on the logical ones only in very high usage, so I'm guessing >> that they are not as fast as real cores. > > Wikipedia has a detailed article on how this works; i don't remember all the > details, but basically it trades off higher clock speeds for more > parallelism, > so whether to activate more cores depends on the task
Hi Steve, Thanks for the information. That is interesting and it makes sense (i.e., trading off higher clock speeds for more parallelism). Did you get the impression that Lion decides when to activate the extra (logical) cores, as opposed to the user having to decide (and possibly make a choice in some preference panel)? Although I always see 16 bars (in iStat Menus or MenuMeters), usually only every other bar moves above zero. So, my guess is that typically only the 8 (physical) cores are being used, but the other 8 (logical) cores can be activated (automatically) if a task can benefit from parallelism. Thanks, Gregg _______________________________________________ MacOSX-talk mailing list [email protected] http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
