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One of the mysteries of life. You would think that a scheduler that just assigned the next available core to the next process would do something good, but the designs of the OSes were apparently blind-sided by multi-cores.

I have all the Windows, but Vista, after the beta trial, it just took too much to run to recommend it to any client.

You would think that a scheduler that just assigned the next available core to the next process would do something good, but the designs of the OSes were apparently blind-sided by multi-cores.

I know. I've written one-off stuff that even does that (with other types of resources). I guess it goes to prove Brook's law that once you get past a few programmers, productivity takes a nosedive.

At least stuff that runs all the time in the background like anti virus and firewall can be assigned to cores 2-4, and let the foreground stuff you consciously run be on core 1. I've done some of that but haven't taken the time to do it all as yet.

Multithreading also needs some real attention before multiple processor chips is going to mean much to average users. Now they just seem to idle along.
Windows could help with this. I'm running XP Pro on a Phenom Quad, and while you can associate a given app to prefer a given core, by default XP seems to throw everything on Core 1 . . . Why doesn't XP default to using an unused core if one is available??

One of the mysteries of life. You would think that a scheduler that just assigned the next available core to the next process would do something good, but the designs of the OSes were apparently blind-sided by multi-cores.

I thought it fascinating that OS X.6, "Snow Leopard," is slated to have "Open GL" technology to make it easier for application writers to more fully exploit multiple cores and even to tap the number crunch capabilities of graphics processors. It seems likely that speech processing will become efficient - and possibly go mainstream - with that sort of technology . . .