Has any one successfuly done a multi threaded Labwindows application with a dual core processor

[mjay]

Is multithreading with a DUAL CORE processor, in terms of the API similar to that with dual PROCESSOR machines. Has anyone attempted this successfully. Are there any considerations that I should take into account with dual core that are different from dual processor?

Thanks in advance

[menchar]

mjay -

We have.  We did have an issue with serial ports - we had a USB / rs-232 dongle thingie (converter 😉 that wouldn't work with hyperthreading (dual core) enabled.  We threw those out and started using NI 8431 PCI boards.  The NI boards are advertised as hyper-thread and multi-processor capable.  They come with a kernel-level driver as well, unlike previous NI serial products that used the native serial driver.

Other than that, no problems to speak of.  Hyperthreading support only available on WinXP as far as I know.

There is a set of design errors that becomes apparent only with true concurrency (as opposed to pseudo-concurrency) but these shouldn't exist in a sound design.

Hayes

[mjay]

My application requires me to use a generic digital I/O card sitting on PCI bus
I/O rates are of the order of 10000 cycles  per sec
I was planning on using a dual core pc and multi-threading to divide the responsibility of
doing the I/O operations and displaying read values on the GUI simulateously
between the 2 cores

(multi threading on a single core system does not seem to satisfy the stringent timing requirements)

I noticed that there are threading functions that can set the thread affinity to a particular processor. Would these same API work with the dual core system?

Thanks

[menchar]

mjay -

Yes, thread affinity works on a hyper-threaded micro.  Whether it's really followed or if it's considered more of a suggestion than a hard requirement is the question.

Intel has a whole website dedicated to discussing hyper-threading technology. 

I don't know where to find a good description for what Windows XP does as far as providing for core scheduling if you don't try to assign affinities.  It would seem that XP must have a balancing algorithm built in - otherwise what would be the sense of saying you had hyper-threading support?

Hayes