My friend recently bought a Trinity Laptop (A10-4600M, Windows 8) and he wanted me to set it up and test it. First thing i did was run Prime95 and Coretemp to make sure it wouldn't overheat. During my first run of Prime95, i set it to 4 cores. When i did that, the multiplier on all 4 cores constantly jumped up and down in Coretemp (From 8.5 to 13.5, i think). I re-ran the test with only 2 cores and the multiplier for all 4 cores was 13.5 throughout the entire test.
I didn't think that meant anything until he downloaded Borderlands 2. They (My friend and my brother) had set the core affinity to (all cores) for some unknown reason, and asked me why the game was running choppy. I explained the whole module thing and set the Core Affinity to cores 0 and 2, and the game began running properly.
There are a few things im wondering regarding this.
1. Did the multiplier jumping have to to with a Turbo boost or Cooling feature in the laptop?
2. On a Desktop FX CPU, Do you think setting the Core Affinity to even cores (0,2,4, and 6) on games increase/decrease performance? (I remember reading that Hyper threading on i7 processors lowered performance in games when compared to I5 processors by 5-10% in one of the initial reviews of the Sandy Bridge ones, and that disabling it was suggested).
3. If someone with an FX Processor can test out question 2.
Decided to also google this before posting, and this is what i found.
http://techreport.com/review/21865/a-qu ... heduling/2
Couldn't find any benchmarks on games regarding core affinity, but it does state there that "In every case but one, distributing the threads one per module, and thus avoiding sharing, produces roughly 10-20% higher performance than packing the threads together on two modules". It also states that the scenario may or may not be the same in games (But if i knew that for certain, i wouldn't even be posting this thread)