Quad Core Utilties

[TonyRage]

Hello,
I am building a new machine for my studio that will be worked fairly harda and I am trying to decide on the right cpu. My question to anyone is:

Are there software utitlies for the Intel Core2QuadCore that allow me to specify which applications and which processes run off of which of the four processes, or is it dependant on the software I am running. If it is the latter, is there a way to find out which software has this capability, or do I just wait and see?

Thank, I appreciate any help I can get on this one.

[spongiforme]

The Windows task monitor can give you a hint... 100% CPU usage on a multi-core or multi-processor machine would suggest that your application is taking advantage of all available CPUs.

On a different topic, there is a imagecfg.exe utility that can tag a program with with a specific "processor affinity", but that's only useful if you want to restrict a program to a set of CPUs. That can be used to work around bugs in programs what do not handle multiple CPUs properly.

There are many benchmarks and reviews of dual or quad core CPUs on the web. They may indicate if the specific software you are interested in takes advantage of multipe CPUs or not. Otherwise, if your program already uses 100% of the available CPU on a dual core machine, chances are that they will also take advantage of a 4 or 8 cores machine. That may also be a question for the software manufacturer.