Dual core question

[milsabords]

Hi,

I have an Athlon 4800+ X2, running Win XP SP2. I do some video encoding
using SUPER, which is a GUI to Mencoder. Process Explorer from Sysinternals
shows that Mencoder has only one thread, however the system view shows both
cores loaded at about 50% by this application.
How come that a one thread program can run on both cores?

Thanks for any explanations.

 

[Benjamin Gawert]

* milsabords:

I have an Athlon 4800+ X2, running Win XP SP2. I do some video encoding
using SUPER, which is a GUI to Mencoder. Process Explorer from Sysinternals
shows that Mencoder has only one thread, however the system view shows both
cores loaded at about 50% by this application.
How come that a one thread program can run on both cores?

Because it's not locked to a certain core but every scheduler cycle
pushed to the core with less load. This results in taskman showing both
cores loaded at 50%.

Benjamin

 

[Ed]

Hi,

I have an Athlon 4800+ X2, running Win XP SP2. I do some video encoding
using SUPER, which is a GUI to Mencoder. Process Explorer from Sysinternals
shows that Mencoder has only one thread, however the system view shows both
cores loaded at about 50% by this application.
How come that a one thread program can run on both cores?

Thanks for any explanations.

Just adding to what Ben said...
but if you want a single threaded app to use just one CPU core you can
set the CPU affinity in task manager by right clicking on the EXE and
then select CPU0 or CPU1 from the list. There are also lots of free CPU
affinity programs out there that can make this task a bit easier if
desired.

Ed

 

[milsabords]

Just adding to what Ben said...
but if you want a single threaded app to use just one CPU core you can
set the CPU affinity in task manager by right clicking on the EXE and
then select CPU0 or CPU1 from the list. There are also lots of free
CPU affinity programs out there that can make this task a bit easier
if desired.

Ed

Thanks. I thought that the allocation of a core to a given thread was
static.