Thread: 4 cores
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Old November 20th 20, 02:54 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware
John McGaw
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Default 4 cores

On 11/20/2020 3:42 AM, micky wrote:
One of the watchwords of computers used to be that they only do one
thing at a time, and they just switch from one thing to another very
quickly.

However, now that cpu's have 2 or 4 cores or more, is that still true?

Does my cpu with 4 cores do up to 4 things at the same time?


Then, if it's supposed to make sounds, more than one core can make
sounds at the same time, right?

But if it's supposed to print something or make an image on the screen,
it can only make one at a time!

Guess that depends on what you are doing at the time. With some programs
every core available may be used for a single task -- video and image tools
for example. With other programs, yeah, you could be processing four
different tasks, literally simultaneously but making allowance for shared
resources like memory and disk holding one or more of them up temporarily.
Or so I understand it. With Intel Hyperthreading you might be doing, well
almost, eight separate tasks at least at times (my casual testing suggests
that I'm getting maybe 1.6 per core on some compute-heavy tasks like BOINC
jobs).

--
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