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: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org