Expert: Andre Hickman - 2/8/2011

Question
Hello,
How Many cores detected by our present running Operating systems(windows).
1.Actual my doubt is I would like to build a systems with AMD Opteron 6000 series (4 processors system 4*12 cores=48 cores) for the using of my Graphics Rendering Purpose (Like Maya, 3D max, Vue etc...). somebody told me with out Os support & Aplication support(maya etc) all cores are not work? is this right or not?
2.above applications (maya, 3d max, e-on vue etc ) used all cores or not (Including real time work and also Rendering)?
thank you for your time and attention
prasad

Answer
They are absolutely correct that without OS and application support, the software will only be able to utilize one core/thread at a time.  I assure you however that any OS that is required to run Max or Maya will be able to multi-core, and in turn both of those softwares can also handle multi-core workflow.  You definitely want to go to autodesk and verify how many cores they can handle.  I have seen Maya run on a 16-core machine...not sure how many cores it was actually using, but If you have the resources to build the machine, I wouldn't hesitate.

I know the cores are used in the Rendering.  I'm not sure how they are used real-time.  I don't think that there are 12-core processors yet.  I know that there are hex-core(six-core# processors with 2-threads per core, which can be seen as 12-cores on a machine. I also would love to know where you are getting a motherboard that can hold 4 processors with that many cores, and how much it costs!!!! I'm thinking that 48 would be overkill, with the exception of rendering.  

One thing to keep in mind when rendering with multicores or machines, you need to render out to an image sequence, and don't try to render to a movie, like a quicktime or avi.  If one of the frames finishes out of sequence #because it is less intense to render) then the entire movie will fail because it doesn't know how to compile a movie and put images in order.

Hope this info helps.

Cheers,
Andre