Miguel de Icaza, Microsoft MVP

[Conrad Knauer]

On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 4:59 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:

>>  [ARM] Cortex A9
[...]
> Furthermore, dual cores do not help, as very little software usefully scales on >1 core.

I am writing this from an Atom 330-based system (dual core @ 1.6 GHz
w/ hyperthreading) and thus Ubuntu's System Monitor reports that there
are four processors.  What I notice is that all four threads are
constantly in use (usually at a low level) and that the system feels
more responsive and less prone to lockups and 'twitiching' (e.g.
seconds on the clock skipping from :35 to :37) than my older (faster
in MHz) single core system which I attribute to the various single
core processes not being able to hog the whole processor (when I look
at the processes tab in System Monitor, I have about four DOZEN,
pretty much all sleeping though).

Multiple cores is not a bad thing in my experience :)  I'm looking
forward to the day when 16 cores are on the low-end models... so in ~5
years? ;)

CK