Thinkpads Forum

Windows task manager is showing 8 cpu's, 4 are always "parked", obviously, since there are only 4...
Anyone else seeing the same? I'm running the 2720QM

Hyper-Threading Technology

"too many cpu's" ? There's no such thing! I can always use more...kinda like money and storage...

I wonder if Windows 7 or any of the newer software is taking advantage of the extra CPUs yet? I know it usually takes a while for the software manufacturers to catch up to the CPU manufacturers. But like the other poster said, there's no such thing as too many CPUs or too much RAM or too much hard drive space. Although I wonder what type of effect it has on the laptop battery and the life of the battery?

Most definitely. I have no problem getting all 8 threads to 100% busy with the i7-2820QM CPU at around 116% of its "maximum" (occasionally 133%) when rendering video in Adobe Media Encoder (Premiere). Right now, just browsing, working on a spreadsheet, total CPU utilization is around 5% of 67% clock with the odd-numbered threads "parked" and load distributed pretty evenly through the four cores.

(I'm using Premiere CS5, btw... I downloaded but have yet to install the CS5.5 trial which promises to use the Quadro 2000M via CUDA. Would be interesting if the CPU utilization slows down, but I doubt it... CUDA mostly handles effects like color correction, not the actual encoding AFAIK. With SD video files on eSATA, CPU is still the bottleneck.)

Yep. Already at XP there was no problem utilizing hyper-threading. First of all, if you just start any two single-threaded applications, Windows will distribute them between the two virtual cores. And most multi-threaded applications get automatic load-balancing too.