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$160
Somebody explain this please. Since there are incredibly few 6-core CPUs, there can't be any s/w optimized for them. Or does the CPU handle that if the s/w simply has some general multicore capacity?
The software is not optimized for them. At this point Win/7 win 2008 etc. will optimize everything for the software as far as core processing is concerned. Only make sure you are using the 64bit version.
That's a gross simplification Shmeagle!
It is true that the operating system will take advantage of all cores when juggling all the threads from all the running processes. However a single threaded application will not run any better on multiple cores than on a single core (assuming that's all that is running). For decently written software, a single multi-thread-capable process should be able to use whatever cores are available (where it makes sense to do so).
So in summary:
1. A process with n threads will have very limited improvement on a system with (n+m) cores. The only improvement might be because there are probably other processes running at the same time.
2. A well-written multi-thread process will take advantage of whatever cores are available.
Be careful, or I'll start pontificating about core pinning etc,.
Pontificating. I like that word.
Of course it's a gross oversimplification. Do you honestly think that most of the users here will get much more out of their system than stock programs run on Win OS?
The point here was that an average user will see about as much in a multi-core system as Win OS will allow it. Unless you are going to by-pass the OS multi-threading and develop specifically to the cores itself you are not going to see much more from an 8 core that you will from a 4 core.
Again some server software such as SQL are written specifically to take advantage, perhaps some games, I don't know.