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Maximising dual core CPUs

mediumsliced

New member
Hi, I have a laptop with a Core 2 Duo T7200 on it. I noticed that Pro/E will not utilize more than 50% of my CPU's resources when doing CPU intensive jobs, like say, regenerating a part will lots of features (patterned). I have tried setting the config.pro option "cpus_to_use" to 2, saved the options and restarted Pro/E, but when I try to repeat it, still no show. Am using WF3 M050.

Any comments?
 
I would think that - like most programs - ProE is not taking full advantage of more than one CPU. The fact that it is mentioned as an option leads to the conclusion that it is taken into account. But it probably only works on part of the program. Using multiple processors means that you have to breakdown actions into "threads". The issue about threads is that if more than one CPU is working you have to split the job and make the different parts "talk" to eachother for intermediate results. This is entirely different programming and not a simple compiling instruction. Dual CPU usage is most likely to be implemented in calculating visibility on drawings, rendering, ...


Alex
 
A lot, ifnot most commercial softwareat the moment DOES NOT make use ofboth CPUs. The process of multithreading is very complex in how 2 CPUs handles set of instructions. Hyperthreading, on the otherhand- which Intel brought out to try and improve the efficiency of a CPU tried to make use of the extra CPU resourceswhich were available but unused during execution. 2 physical processors were'seen' by the operation system.CPUs often had wasted clock cycles as the 'pipe' was not filled before execution. Hyperthreading can actually have an adverse effect on some programs - benchmarking in Pro/E has shown a decrease in performance of around 15% in some cases (it is program specific). The new dual core CPUs available are more efficent at filling the 'pipe' prior to a clock cycle and therefore have increased performance at generally reduced clock speeds.


Phil
 
Can you turn them off? It wouldn't make sense to turn dual core CPUs off but it may be beneficial to turn off hyperthreading in the CPUs in your BIOS. You'd have to run some tests to check performance in Pro/E with it turned on or off.


Phil
 
Like HT, dual cores can be turned off in the BIOS of your machine. I am not sure about the specifics, but I'd guess that it fools the OS into thinking that there's only one 4 GHz CPU, instead of two 2 GHz ones. Just a guess. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong.
 
mediumsliced said:
Like HT, dual cores can be turned off in the BIOS of your machine. I am not sure about the specifics, but I'd guess that it fools the OS into thinking that there's only one 4 GHz CPU, instead of two 2 GHz ones. Just a guess. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong.


Yeah, this functionallity would be really nice, but in fact. If you disable the dual core processor, you are just telling the second core to do nothing..
 
Dual cores may not speed up Pro/E but they definitely make for a nice responsive PC it like me you have 10 different apps open at once. If you run FEA it is almost a must if you want to be able to do anything else while the solver runs.
 
S:B:C, yeah, I guess I was hoping for too much.

dr_gallup, isn't there a way to reduce the thread priority of the FEA solver? There should be some lightweight freeware out there that prevents one single thread from hogging 100% of the CPU to prevent stuff like this from happening.
 
Within task manager you can select any process and give it a priority level. You need sufficient rights of course.
 
You can use the "Set Affinity" function in prosess tab in task manager to set proe to use just one cpu, and the rest of the programs you got running to use the other. This will often give a little extra speed, and it will make it possible to work with other programs even though proe is working on full load...
 
149755, could you tell, please, if it is possible to make Windiws memorize these settings (I mean "Set affinity" function)? I'm afraid that after each reboot I'll have to configure more than 50 processes.
 
Even though most PC software isn't multi-threaded, I'm still disappointed Pro/E doesn't utilize multi-cpu/cores well. Pro/E is an extremely expensive,relatively hardware performance-dependent application.


What surprised me the most is that Unix machines in particular have come in multi-CPU forms for well over a decade and such machines have long been reasonably popular as workstations. Hell,the Unix-oriented CPUs (Sparc, Alpha, MIPS, IBM Power, etc) have always been designed for multi-CPU use (much more multi than just 2-way multi, as in 8-way, 16-way, etc.). Dual core cpus might be new to home users and Windows but they've been common in unix workstations for a couple decades. CAD, of course, came up on Unix machines.
Edited by: 2ms1
 
The problem is that multi-threaded programming is of an entirely different order than "straight" programming. It isn't just recompiling the existing code for a different environment. We will see more and more multithreaded routines getting integrated, but in view of the general complexity of CAD software the process will IMHO be slow. Even the normal upgrading causes lots of unwanted bugs in other parts of the application, CAD-companies won't risk turning their entire development upside down.


Alex
 

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