What controls how many cores are being used?

[headless97]

Hello,
Let's say, being hypothetical, that I have a quad-core processor and that I plan on doing a lot of multitasking. How do I know how many of my cores are actually being used? What is the controlling mechanism for which processes go where? Does the operating system control it? Is the processor smart enough to know what to do? Do the programs decide?

Let me try to clarify: If I have a program using one core and I open a new program, what decides whether that program is processed by the first core already in use or the second core that is not in use?

Thank you all
Brennen

 

[hunter315]

The operating system controls what threads are running on which cores, it tries to avoid having cores flip flopping between tasks if possible as that takes a significant performance hit and tries to spread the load fairly evenly across the cores. Some programs have multiple threads and can be run on multiple cores at the same time, but this is determined by how the program was complied when it was written and isnt something that can be adjusted.

You can see how much of each cores is being used in the performance tab of task manager in windows, just make sure you have it set to one graph per core not one graph per CPU.

 

[headless97]

Best answer selected by Headless97.

 

[headless97]

Thanks a million. I was really curious about this and it's nice to have a solid answer.

 

[hunter315]

This topic has been closed by Hunter315