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BGonline.org Forums
PC's i7 processor
Posted By: Michael Petch In Response To: PC's i7 processor (Jason Lee)
Date: Tuesday, 9 June 2009, at 2:12 a.m.
That can be answered simplistically as "Any software that was designed to execute in a single thread of execution". Such software will generally not perform significantly better with multiple cores because it was designed to be run as a single thread of execution. Sometimes an application can run slightly better (10-20%) with 2 cores (but not anywhere near double the speed). This is because of some parallelism/pipelining done at the processor level, or the GUI being run in one thread and the program in another.
Most of todays modern mathematical software, graphics processing, and games software are designed to split taks up into differing thread of execution. The threads an then be offloaded by the Operating system to be run on an available core. Such software will usually benefit with more cores.
There is no hard and fast rule when you are at the store buying new software as to whether it will benefit. Usually you have to do your homework (google) ahead of time. I have found a lot of software that hasn't been updated in the past 5 years generally doesn't scale well to multi-processor systems.
To give an example. You could have a 256 core system (hypothetically) running ANY version of Snowie and *basically* a single core will be used at any given time. This is a severe limitation with Snowie. You could run multiple copies of snowie at the same time, and each could run in a separate processor - but thats about it. The limitation is in how Oasya currently does an analysis. It doesn't split the tasks up in such a way that an operating system can put each task/thread onto a free core.
Gnubg has had multithreaded support for a while, but it hasn't been until the last 6 months where is started to finally become *relatively* stable. Unlike Snowie, Gnubg splits the task of analyzing up into threads and then passes them off to the OS and then basically runs the thread on an available processor.
What makes things worse is that Microsoft (in their infinite wisdom) cripples standard copies of it OS's to limit the number of processors that can be used at once. You could have a 8 processor system and Windows XP will only allow you to use 2 cores! Generally you need to buy the server editions of Microsoft's OS's to allow you to use more cores.
For more information on that you can see:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888732 http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/winvista_editions_final.asp
Its for these reasons that I generally use GnuBG on large multicore systems using Linux instead of MS Windows. Linux will happily attempt to use everything on your system (limited to what the hardware supports).
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