On Wednesday 29 August 2007 10:46, Robert Lewis wrote: > I was thinking about buying a Q6600 processor that > has four cores. > > Does anyone have htop running using this processor?
It handles two just fine, I'm sure four will work, too. > Does htop show all four cores? It should. > Is the current kernel multi-threaded such that the > end user gets any benefit if they purchase this processor? Linux has been able to support multi-CPU and multi-core processor for quite a while. The issue is more how any given application is written. No application parallelizes automatically. > My laptop has dual core and I do see htop reporting that > the both CPU's are being utilized. Modern operating systems frequently have more than one runnable thread or process. Individual applications are another story. While GUI applications typically have a certain amount of multi-threading to accommodate the event-driven programming model of modern GUI frameworks, their "core" functionality is something else. Some do and some don't. It's not even meaningful for all applications to be multi-threaded. Anyway, the advent of multi-core processors is driving developers to exploit them on a more widespread basis for the first time. You can expect a couple of things: 1) An general trend toward better performance as multi-core systems become more common and programmers learn to exploit them. 2) Concurrency bugs: Concurrent programming can be much more challenging than conventional single-thread programming. Programmers, especially application programmers, haven't generally had to deal with concurrent programming models in the past. The Core 2 processors are a considerable improvement over their predecessors. I doubt you'll be sorry to have built a system around one of them. > Cheers, > Bob Randall Schulz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
