does rosetta really use both cores?

[excalibur313]

Does anyone know for certain that one core translates the code while the other executes it? I was telling that to a friend who works for intel and he was very surprised; he was more under the impression that most operating systems don't really take advantage of the extra cores.

 

[FocusAndEarnIt]

Hrm. I don't think any one knows on the boards here, i mean it's a process that's behind the scenes, you can't see it. and.. not many people here have them, just a few.

 

[Eidorian]

I think it just distributes the translation between the CPU's so it "seems" faster. The single CPU should translate it but expect higher CPU usage. RAM appears to be a bigger factor. From what I could tell on my tests it stores translated coding in the RAM.

I'll do some more testing on the iMac with 512 MB in the campus store. Google Earth and Office were really fast after the translation. It's just that FIRST startup that's slow. The odd thing is that Excel opened lightning quick after I only opened Word.

 

[plinden]

It's hard to tell. Looking at the Activity Monitor while starting a PPC app, e.g. OpenOffice, I typically see equal activity on both cores, but since OpenOffice runs in X11, and multiple threads are running, I don't know if that's Rosetta or X11 or OpenOffice threads that are running across cores.