Why are 7 threads the most active ones?

[YoungBlade]

I get that some cores are better than others, and so the CPU will favor them, but I'm finding that 7 threads in particular are being used more often than the others when I'm in Windows. I would've expected 4, 6, or 8, but 7 is weird to me. That means that at least one core is only given work on one thread, and it's always the same thread.

 

I'm just curious if anyone has an explanation for what I'm seeing. It obviously isn't a problem, but it struck me as odd.

 

Is this just an odd quirk of my CPU? Can SMT favor a particular thread path? Is this a Windows thing to primarily use 7 threads of a CPU?

[Guest]

2 minutes ago, YoungBlade said:

I get that some cores are better than others, and so the CPU will favor them, but I'm finding that 7 threads in particular are being used more often than the others when I'm in Windows. I would've expected 4, 6, or 8, but 7 is weird to me. That means that at least one core is only given work on one thread, and it's always the same thread.

 

I'm just curious if anyone has an explanation for what I'm seeing. It obviously isn't a problem, but it struck me as odd.

 

Is this just an odd quirk of my CPU? Can SMT favor a particular thread path? Is this a Windows thing to primarily use 7 threads of a CPU?

i know it may sound stupid but i think my friend experiences a similar thing using his 3090 i dont know if its related or not? i see that u have an rtx card is it a 3090 though?

[Jumballi]

Cause windows scheduler is weird.

[YoungBlade]

1 minute ago, Lyrix_m said:

i know it may sound stupid but i think my friend experiences a similar thing using his 3090 i dont know if its related or not? i see that u have an rtx card is it a 3090 though?

RTX 2060 Super - I'm waiting on GPU prices to normalize before I upgrade.

 

I was using Nvidia Broadcast during a Skype call, so the GPU was working and using RTX features.

[Cyracus]

I lack the word goodness to explain at the moment. It's optimization so that the fastest most best cores on your cpu are the first ones used, so for loads that don't load almost all of the cpu it will use the same best operating cores/threads. With Ryzen boosting behavior it means a little better performance.

[da na]

My Xeon does the same thing. Of its 32 threads, sometimes 4-16 of them will be at really high usage. Not exactly sure why, but I think Windows "assigns" less demanding tasks (such as background processes, eg. email) to specific threads with lower usage.

[Vishera]

I usually have 0.1% usage on all cores when idling,

I think that the bloatware on your system is doing that.

[Bombastinator]

It’s possible I suppose, that on your specific chip thread 7 is the one that throws the most ghz for the least heat, so it’s the one windows uses hardest.  It might also just be a windows weirdness and it doesn’t pay attention to that stuff.  I don’t know.  I understand that AMD chips are known to do that though so it wouldn’t surprise me if intel didn’t too.

[YoungBlade]

29 minutes ago, Vishera said:

I usually have 0.1% usage on all cores when idling,

I think that the bloatware on your system is doing that.

I was in a Skype call, while using OBS and Nvidia Broadcast to frame the camera. I just installed Windows 4 days ago; there is no bloatware on the system.

 

By "in Windows" I just meant not in games, where the core usage is different.

[Vishera]

1 minute ago, YoungBlade said:

I just installed Windows 4 days ago; there is no bloatware on the system.

The thing is that Windows now days comes with lots of bloatware out of the box and it runs in the background using system resources.

That's why tools like Windows 10 Debloater exist:

https://github.com/Sycnex/Windows10Debloater