If I have X cores on my machine and I start X threads. Let's assume for the sake of argument that each thread is completely separated in terms of the memory, hdd, etc it uses. Is the OS going to know to send each thread to a core or do more time slicing on one core for multiple threads. What the question boils down to, is if I have X cores and my program must do independent calculations, should I start X threads, will they each get piped to a core, or is the presumption that because I have X cores I can start X threads completely wrong? I'm thinking it is. This is with C# --
I'm going to say no...
The .NET team introduced the TPL to explicitly delegate thread execution to utilize multiple cores. Windows Vista didn't have much intelligence built in to support the OS delegating threads to multiple cores. I'm not suprised to see this improvement in the .NET framework(4.0) considering that Windows 7 has much improved support for multiple cores.