Quote from wilburbear:
I'm missing something.
I always thought it was a ripoff that Intel sold 2 chips on a "dual core" chip. The majority of the time, I was told, the 2 chips couldn't work together unless multithreaded apps were available - which were rare. So, one chip sits there and takes most of the load, while the other does very little.
Shouldn't THESE 2 chips within the existing "dual core" system be made to better handle the load with the Synergy software?
With Synergy, can you get 2 dual core machines, and now multiply your nonperforming chips to 2?
But hardware is not my thing.
Answers?
It's not a ripoff, and the two cores do get used. Assuming you are on Windows, if you open task manager and click the processes tab, you will see a list of say, 30 to 100 processes (programs) running. Most of these programs run in the background, and most of the time most of them are idle. However, any number of them can run (ie do something useful) "simultaneously". The OS continuously assigns tiny timeslots (measured in microseconds or milliseconds) to each program, and assigns one or other core to each in turn. Windows on a dual core can give out two processing timeslots simultaneously, and those two may go to two separate programs or one multithreaded program. So, all the busy programs look like they're running simultaneously, (because they're all getting regular CPU timeslots), although on a dual core only two programs will actually be running on a CPU core at any given instant.
Multithreaded may becomes relevant if you have a program that needs very high intensity processing - say running a monte carlo sim, or a game. Then, if the program is multithreaded it can potentially make use of two cores at the same time (subject always to the scheduling). And if the OS doesn't give it two cores simultaneously, the separate threads can still run serially.
Multithreaded programs may or may not be written with multiple cores in mind. Probably just as often a multithreaded design is the result of a better organisation/design of the software (think of a realtime trading app - it probably has one controlling thread dealing also with input and output to the screen, and one or more other threads listening for incoming internet traffic. Periodically the two threads will talk to each other and swap data. That is just a sound design, and doesn't require multiple cores.
It's analagous on other modern OS.
Synergy is nothing to do with dual cores or multithreading - this is just smart software that enables computers to talk to each other and figure out which PC the KB/Mouse input is intended for.