Optimise Windows for dual-core

Changing your processor affinity
This one is a bit more complex. When you right click on your processes in the Windows Task Manager, you are given the ‘Set affinity’ option. This action lets you limit the execution of the process to a selected processor. In the case of a QX6800, processors 0, 1, 2 or 3. If you are willing to micro-manage certain processes such as one session of Adobe Audition, one session of Maya and one session of Blender, you could assign Adobe Audition to proc0, Maya to proc1 and Blender to proc2. This will have the effect of dedicating each process to that related core. Segregating processes like this can greatly improve the chances of the process getting dedicated time throughout the FDE cycle if it isn’t a highly-threaded application. This however, is dependent on the underlying operating system (discussed later). Processor affinity binding from the Windows XP/Vista GUI is shown in figures 2 and 3.

Figure 1 – Vista process priority control.

Figure 2 – Processor affinity on right click.

Figure 3 – IntFilter interrupt binding tools.

You can automate this process, so that you don’t have to set your process affinities for different applications on every boot by using ImageConfig

Interrupt juggling
Even more complex again, we can actually assign groups or interrupt sets to physical processors. Binding of device interrupts to particular processors on multi-core systems is a useful technique to maximise performance, scaling and partitioning. Interrupt-Affinity Filter (IntFiltr) is an interrupt-binding tool that permits you to establish affinity for device processors on multi-core hardware.

IntFilter can be downloaded from the Microsoft Windows 2003 resources kit companion pages.

Using highly-threaded applications
You’d think it would be a no-brainer, but things just aren’t that simple. When you are seeking out an application to perform a task, be it DVD encoding, movie authoring, audio rendering, database compacting, image processing or otherwise, be conscious of the vendor notes. ‘Optimised for dual-core’ or ‘Designed for SMP environments’, is what we are looking for. Many vendors now actively offer SMP-aware versions of their applications. Companies such as Adobe, SlySoft, Elaborate Bytes, Canopus, Ahead and Sony ship most of their products with a highly-threaded codebase. The best examples we can give are situations such as:

Don’t use 3DSMax 7. Use 8 or 9.
Don’t use DVDShrink. Use CloneDVD2.
Don’t use Photoshop 6 or 7. Use 9 (CS2) or 10 (CS3).
Don’t use Sonic Foundry’s Soundforge 6 or below. Use Sony’s 8 or a greater.

At this point, it is common sense. The newer versions of the applications support highly-threaded execution.