Re: 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).

-- 
Bodger's Dictum: Artifical intelligence
can never overcome natural stupidity.