As a software developer it is not only important to know the latest frameworks, but to also know abut hardware evolution. Why? Because the hardware is executing our software. And the main problem there is that the hardware now can execute more than one thread in parallel. Well it can since some years, but only recently the number of parallel threads went up. And the days were this was only true for server hardware are over. The main problem is, that most software just cannot be run multithreaded, just because the code is written in a linear way.

When I upgrade my PC at home, I usually buy the latest architecture, but not the fastest available version. That is because they usually do not bring much added value for way to much added price.
Wednesday I got a box from silentmaxx, featuring an Intel i7 940, 6GB RAM with an Nvidia Geforce GTX 260. I chose a system built by silentmaxx, because they have specialized in building silent PCs. They have an excellent case designed for this purpose and only use selected and tested components. And they sell it for an appropriate price. So far I am pretty impressed, because it is indeed very quiet.

My next plans are now to start developing my Scala skills and see if I can get all 8 threads of the i7 working nicely. Oh well and such a rig is also good for gaming :-)

The only problem will be to find out how the CPU is actually used. It seems that even the sysinternals tools cannot gather information about thread execution per CPU. Does anybody have an idea?