random cpu core question

[Bwils]

I just put in an used processor in my computer and I wanted to check if all the cores were running. It is an i7 970 cpu (6 cores). Google said use task manager, or device manager, and msconfig to check how many cores are working. All three of these sources on my computer show I am running 12 cores, which does not make sense. Anyone able to explain?

[odiecat99]

Well it sayd im running 4 but mines only 2.. soooo. Simply put youre fine.

[Bwils]

so its prob reading threads not cores?

[odiecat99]

Thats what im thinking my man

[Orruar]

The i7 is hyperthreaded, like most of the non-cheap Intel CPUs. This means each core essentially runs 2 threads in parallel at the hardware level. So you basically have 12 cores available.

[r00t]

I think this is always the case but there might be one or two exceptions: all generations of the i3 and i7 are hyperthreaded (i5 is not). This means that there is 1 extra virtual core for every physical core in the actual piece of hardware. The virtual cores are essentially the same thing as a real core, in that it can run instructions concurrently, not mentioning some of the pros and cons of the architecture (because of the way threads sometimes have to share information, they can actually run much faster, if a program is optimized correctly. goog luck in C but with C++11 its pretty easy).

The 970 is an older model but still performs pretty well. The instructions per cycle for each individual core is not as high as the newer chips, but since you have 12 cores it kind of offsets it a bit. Normally i7's usually only come with 4 real cores, but they have a second more expensive model that comes with 6, such as yours.

The highest end Intel Xeon chips (meant for servers and such) have 12 physical cores, hyperhtreaded, for 24 cores.

[Bwils]

thanks for the information

[dali_lb]

Since it's an Intel with Hyperthreading (2 virtual threads per core) it will always show double ammount of the physical core's available.

It will however not help you with EQ Titanium client since it can only use 1 core, no matter its 2,3,4 or 6 physical cores or hyperthreading or not

It will help with most other modern applications and games tho.

If you can set the cpu affinity of the EQ client to something other than 0 it might help performance, since all programs that may run in the background wich do not support multi-threading will always default to cpu affinity 0 (the first core) wich you can see by Cttrl-Alt-Del and watch the graph of the CPU cores. The first core is normally always more saturated than the rest.