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Is there a way to determine (or even better, to log) how much benefit I'm getting from my computer's multi-threading capabilities?
Background: My higher-ups are proposing to give me and my team new workstations. Looking at some synthetic benchmarks, the new machines have slightly higher scores, but they are lower number of cores and threads (4 core, 8 threads) compared to our current ones (6 cores, 12 threads). A couple people (myself included) have dual processor models (so 12 cores and 24 threads).
I'm trying to find out if there is a way to track how much my current usage is actually taking advantage of all the available cores or if the higher single-thread speeds of the proposed workstations would overcome the deficit of cores. I've looked at the CPU utilization in Task Manager, but obviously if I'm looking at that then I'm not really using my computer like I normally do, so the numbers/graphs are not much help.
*** The team does dev work, especially using Visual Studio, SQL Server and ArcGIS, and we are starting to use Hyper V more often (in case any of this makes a difference). I specifically did not list the processors involved because I don't want this to sound like a hardware recommendation question.
techturtle
Posted 2017-10-23T15:21:34.343
Reputation: 8 059
1Just at first thought I'm sure it's possible to measure the CPU-time-per-instruction-per-thread as well as the total number of simultaneous instruction-thread groups. But I'd guess that the raw numbers may not be immediately useful. Further, can I guess that you're considering going from AMD CPUs to Intel? As these processors are quite different, it will be even more difficult to get truly comparative measurements. Just my opinion, but you'd have to be doing something truly unique to experience any measurable loss going from 6 cores to 4. – music2myear – 2017-10-23T15:42:20.277
Ditto on the Intel vs AMD remark. My second question is, why do a couple people have dual CPU setups? Unless you do some extremely crazy stuff, it sounds like these workstations are built very overkill. – DrZoo – 2017-10-23T16:02:29.293
For windows, I would see if permon has the CPU counters you want. You can have it record all your metrics too. – SpiderIce – 2017-10-23T16:19:49.770
Actually they're both Intel, but it's Xeon to i7. The dual proc ones are overkill... they were bought for a project and I inherited mine when I joined the team. The real question is whether we should bother to "upgrade" from such overkilled machines or push for something like better SSDs instead. If nothing we use takes advantage of all those threads, then the higher single thread speeds should help out. – techturtle – 2017-10-23T16:23:55.467