On 28/06/11 13:21, Ross Mounce wrote:
Dear list,
I recently bought a fairly new Samsung N150 Plus netbook off a friend.
Dumped the windows crippleware 'Starter' OS, and installed Ubuntu 64-bit
11.04
<snip>
Two questions: A) Why does it show as 4 processors? Are these all real?
It uses a technology called Hyperthreading, it used to be used on the
old Pentium 4 chips and Intel have started using it on the Atom and the
new Core i5 and i7 CPUs. Basically it makes the OS think that it has
twice as many cores as it really has.
I understand that on applications that don't use the CPU much it can
improve things but if you are running suff that hammers the CPU then
there isn't much benefit.
I'd guess that if you're doing web browsing and what not then it might
make things a little bit quicker, but it certainly isn't as quick as a
real quad core CPU.
Have I somehow 'unlocked' another couple *hopes*?
Nope, not on the Atom. I've heard stories of the Athlon II and Phenom
II chips being able to have cores 'unlocked' with certain motherboards
and bioses as the X3 CPUs (and I believe Phenom X2 CPUs) tend to be X4
CPUs that have had cores disabled. Although I also gather that the
cores may be disabled because of some faults, maybe such as they can't
run at the rated speed or something.
B) If it's just 4 threads, can I optimally run 4
separate instances of a 32-bit program one each on each thread/core
without losing overall efficiency? (The program I have in mind is a bit
technical/obscure, and no, it doesn't have a 64-bit version)
Being a Hyperthreading CPU, I'd say yes and no. Depends how much it
uses the CPU. It's been a while since I looked into Hyperthreading,
this article on Wikipedia covers it better than I can explain it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading
Rob
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