Nowadays, desktop and workstations are getting more powerful as they have multi-core processors.
For the versions of Windows that support multi-core processors, do these versions actually utilize these multi-core processors or does the operating system just use 1 core at a single time?
How can I tweak Windows 7 or 8 to utilize multi-core processors?
Best Answer
To put it short with the author's last question: Windows 7 or 8 will use all the cores. When you go to the task manager and see all those processes running, Windows has dibbied them up between the available cores. (The task manager's performance tab will show you that they're all doing something.)
Note that one of those processes can only be running on one core at any time. The exception to this rule is software specifically written to take advantage of multiple cores at the same time. These software programs are extremely complex.
It's not up to Windows to decide if a certain process will use more than one core at a time - it's entirely the software's. A program that would greatly benefit from utilizing multiple cores at once would be converting video files or other CPU-intensive work. It can greatly reduce the time necessary to get the job done.