Use more processors excel for mac software#
Just like true multi-core processors, software needs to be written as “multi-threaded” in order to take advantage of hyperthreading. As a gross oversimplification, it amounts to an optimization in the CPU innards that treats certain operations as if there were two CPUs, even though there are not. Without actually being a dual-core CPU, a processor that supports hyperthreading actually looks like a dual-core processor to most software. One technology that often confuses both people and software is Intel’s hyperthreading. When a such a task is in progress, it’s typically using as much of the processor’s capabilities as it can in order to complete its work. Anything that does a lot of math or calculation, or manipulates a lot of data in your computers’ RAM memory, could end up being processor intensive. Excel is a good example, but there are others, like image, audio, and video compression and manipulation. Processor-intensive tasks, on the other hand, usually involve calculations of some sort. The bottom line is that your computer’s processor is spending most of its time just waiting, doing almost nothing. It might be waiting for the next byte of data to come down your internet connection or the next block of data to arrive from your hard disk or, it might be waiting for you to type the next character. Reading email, browsing the web, typing up a document – these are not processor-intensive tasks. As you do any of those things, the computer’s processor is spending most of its time idle, waiting for something else. When you use software that can do one processor-intensive thing and spread it across multiple processors.When you do several different processor-intensive things at once.There are at least two times that multiple-core processors can be beneficial: 1 Unless you’re specifically interested in some aspect of having multiple cores, the distinction isn’t important. More often, and perhaps more correctly, it’s also used to refer to the entire processor, no matter how many cores it contains. The term “CPU” is sometimes used to refer to each individual core in a processor, as I’ve used it above left. Unfortunately this also leads to some confusion in terminology, as the acronym CPU (Central Processing Unit) isn’t always used consistently: (I’ll be using quad core as my example throughout this article, but the comments apply to all multi-core processor chips, though the math might change a little). It’s kind of like having four computers instead of just one. This is completely expected, and depends entirely on the software you’re running.Ī “core” is, in essence, a single CPU. Thus, a “quad-core” machine has the equivalent of four separate CPUs on a single chip. Each CPU can execute tasks independently of the others (I’m oversimplifying, of course) without being affected by the others. The bad news is that … there’s nothing to be fixed. The good news, if you want to call it that, is that there’s nothing wrong. Here you go and spend extra money to get that super fast quad- (or more) core processor, throw a huge task at it expecting it to go two or four times faster… It’s one of the most frustrating things to experience.
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