Hi folks, I notice the trend in desktop CPUs is that clock speeds have been steady for some time at 2...4GHz obviously depending on price, while the number of cores is on the increase, current offerings running from one to eight cores. I always thought that more cores is good for doing lots of things simultaneously, but not necessarily for single CPU-intensive tasks, as these are often not able to run in multiple threads/cores at the same time. I'm obviously not an expert, so do correct me if I'm wrong. To check this, on a dual-core system, I tried looking at ksysguard (System Monitor), and as expected I see that a number of CPU-intensive tasks run up to 49% CPU usage (example: file compression with ark). Surprisingly, however, when I switch to the 'System Load' tab in ksysguard, the graph clearly shows CPU1 and CPU2 both running at or near maximum (100%), even though the CPU usage of all processes adds up to much less (say, 49% for ark, and not more than 10% for everything else). Two questions: 1) For typical desktop use, is it more sensible to buy a six-core 2,5GHz processor, or a dual-core 3,6GHz? In other words, should I prefer more cores, or higher clock speed? (I'm aware of the 'benchmark'-style comparisons around the Internet, but it's their ecological validity I'm curious about.) 2) Is what I see a possible bug in ksysguard, or is there something I'm not understanding here? Cheers! Haro -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org