TR Forums

When in the task manager in window 7 64 bit and I select Processes and go to Set Affinity I have 9 boxes to check off if i want to, The top one is All processors, then they have 8 other selections CPU 0 through CPU 7 for the 8 threads. My question is what thread are the Hyperthreaded cores and what ones are the actual cores.

I am curious if i set say fraps, afterburner and speedfan to work on only HT cores and leave the real cores for the heavy lifting. Or should i just leave well enough alone since I am having no problem at all.

Also i have notice much less tearing and microstuttering with my 560ti SLI setup. It has been silky smooth with the new tomb raider maxed out at over 100fps and the latest MOH based on the frostbite 2 engine is blazing fast also. I am running the latest drivers and i am very curious if they have fixed the frame ltency that looked so bad in the earlier frame latency TR articles for my 560 ti SLI setup.
Has anyone else that is running 560ti1gb cards in SLI noticed that they are very much smoother with less to no tearing?

Just a happy camper since i was so worried i was going to have to replace my video cards but they are working fantastic!

There aren't hyperthreading and actual physical cores to transparently pick between. Hyperthreading is the machine allowing for multhreading; the machine runs two threads on the same core. The hyperthreading cores aren't separate physical devices.

Leave it all alone.

I think each physical core is assigned two tick boxes, starting off with Core 0 and 1. To assign a thread to the first physical core, for example, it doesn't matter whether you check Core 0 or Core 1 inside Task Manager. The OS scheduler will assign the thread to the first physical core. Same thing when you're assigning two different threads to the same physical core, say, the third physical core. You can assign the first thread to Core 5 and the second thread to Core 4 -- doesn't matter if you switch them. The OS will understand that you're assigning both threads to the third physical core and the CPU will do its own thing, allocating the execution resources within the third core to both threads accordingly. The core does the resource allocation on the fly with its own HT hardware.

I actually can relate with what you wanna do here. I have an FX-8350 and obviously, eight cores come up in Task Manager. Normally I would assign my tasks to as few cores/modules as possible. For example, when I'm browsing the Internet and running BitTorrent at the same time, I would assign both tasks to the same module, one thread for each of the two cores in a module. Doing this should help Windows decide to park the other modules so I can save some power. Obviously the FX is very different from the i7 in terms of what those 'cores' mean under Task Manager, but here, you see that it doesn't matter to which core I assign a thread in any given module. That particular module will work on both tasks equally and no task is given more priority over the other within that module. This isn't exactly what happens inside a physical i7 core, but you get the general idea.

Thanks for the responses . I figured I was going to get those answers since google was so vague on the whole idea. One google link had a person asking the same thing as I was. I hate answers that include should or probably or maybe core 0 is physical and core 1 is HT and so on.
Thanks again!

Many folks don't really understand the concept of Hyperthreading, or SMT, which also makes them say things that are wrong with Intel's and AMD's current CPUs. Both Intel's Core and AMD's FX cores are totally different kinds of processing machines, despite having 8 cores in Task Manager, at least with respect to their full-feature models.