Using WF 5 M040 on Win 7 Pro on a Dell Precision T5500 with an
Intel Xeon E5640 processor with 6 Gb RAM that shows eight cores on Task Manager.
Doing regens, etc... on parts and assemblies only shows activity on one core only.
I don't have Mechanica or Interlink to test, I don't think that testing Mechanica Lite is of any value for this issue.
The OS and multiple cores do seem to behave better than the older dual processor systems under Win NT or Win2K. For example:
ANSYS Workbench v12.1 for will 'spike' all eight cores at times. I can't tell how much of this is processing and how much of this is Windows housekeeping. The overall cpu is at about 25% though. Other apps (like Pro-E) run very well while ANSYS is running, and the system performance overall is very good.
I agree that on a 64 bit system, the 3Gb switch has no application.
There was a thread I read somewhere, where using the 3GB switch on a 32 bit system can actually destabilize the system. The 3Gb switch was originally designed for database or file server machines with modest graphic cards. If I remember (I could be wrong), it allowed a 32 bit system to address 36 bits of address space.
The 3Gb switch can cause the system to try to use some of the space that can be also allocated to managing the memory requirements of graphics cards with large amounts of RAM. The graphics card and/or the app and/or the OS becomes unstable and crashes.
Christopher F. Gosnell
FPD Company
124 Hidden Valley Road
McMurray, PA 15317