Can linux aps use mutiple cores?

[MASONTX]

In the world of the other OS, there is a debate about how useful multi core cpus are. The arguement is that most applications aren't written to take advantage of multiple cores. Can most linux aps take advantage of mutiple cores?

[Rubberman]

An application that consists of several processes, or threads, will take advantage of multi-core or multi-cpu systems. For example, I use a video conversion tool called ffmpeg which allows me to specify how many threads to use then converting a video from one format to another. The speedup is pretty much linear in that if I specify 8 threads (1 per core) then I get the conversion done in 1/7 to 1/8 the time.

[Cabhan]

The problem with multiple cores is not really OS-dependent (assuming a reasonable thread scheduler). It has to do with programmers.

For the past many, many years, programming has tended towards the heavily sequential model. This was fine as long as single processors were getting continuously faster: it's one thread of execution, but it's fast.

The trend now is for smaller individual cores, but more concurrent threads of execution, so although a single computation is slower, you can do many in parallel. This requires that code be written in a parallelized fashion, so that these many cores can be taken advantage of.

Not all pre-existing algorithms are easily parallelizable, so it has been a period of re-learning for many developers in order to learn about how to write multi-threaded, parallel programs. However, once this style of programming is better engrained in us, applications, no matter the platform, will be able to take better advantage of multi-core systems.

[MASONTX]

Thank you for the answers.

[Freston]

Dump: An article Cabhans post reminded me off... Verity Stob