It's an option in Settings: Number of Helper Threads: Use Recommended (8), None, or 2, 4, 6, etc. up to 16.
Now, I can Google as well as the next man, and I came up with this discussion:
Quote:
A thread is a single line of commands that are getting processed, each application has at least one thread, most have multiples. A core is the physical hardware that works on the thread. In general a processor can only work on one thread per core, CPUs with hyper threading can work on up to two threads per core.
For processors with hyper threading, there are extra registers and execution units in the core so it can store the state of two threads and work on them both, normally to change threads you have to empty the registers into the cache, write that back to the main memory, then load up the cache with the new values and load up the registers, context switches hurt performance significantly.
Core = hardware. Thread = how the hardware is supplied with information. Think of it as the 'road' by which the information gets into the CPU core.
Some processors, like the i7-2600K, have hyper-threading. This is where each core can take 2 threads. In layman's terms, although the CPU has 4 physical cores, it allows the CPU to act as if it had 8 cores. Generally only useful for high-intensity program that do modelling or video-editing work.
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Most of which is Greek to me.
So my questions are more practical: Under what circumstances would I be concerned about this setting? What goal would I have in mind for changing it and what adjustment would I be making in order to attain that goal?
Yes, I know the obvious answer: "If you don't need to know what it is, consider yourself lucky and leave it alone." I'm just curious (but not enough to come anywhere
near it with my mouse pointer
).