Core A4 and A7

[ChrisS]

I have an i5 2320 CPU that has AVX and is running core A7

I also have an i7 2600 CPU with AVX but is only running Core A4

Is this something I need to tweak in settings somewhere?

Many thanks.

[bruce]

No.

There are a mixture of projects available for A4 and for A7. Apparently there were no A7 WUs available at the instant your client requested a new WU, so it gave you an assignment for A4.

The Assignment Server is unable to predict when the next A7 WU will become available, so it's better to give your system something that it can work on than to wait an unpredictable amount of time with nothing to do.

[JimboPalmer]

Your I5 2320 and i7-2600 are 'Sandy Bridge' which has AVX but not the AVX2 introduced in 'Haswell' that really shows off A7.

Currently there are many more projects using A4 than A7.

[ChrisS]

Ok, thank you, those replies make sense to me. Basically Older processors taking pot luck on work units received.

[Joe_H]

Actually all CPU's take pot luck on getting WU's from the A4 and A7 projects. Older CPU's without AVX will still get assigned A7 WU's, the core they will use has been compiled to use SSE2 instructions. When A7 WU's are in short supply, both older and newer CPU's will get the available A4 WU's.

[bruce]

FAH would be slightly more efficient if they programmed the Assignment Server to preferentially assign A7 WUs to AVX clients and A4 WUs to SSE2-only clients. (You'd be happier too.) Preferential treatment logic would could be added to the Assignment Server logic but that's an enhancement which could only work if the FAHClient was also enhanced to provide that information about your hardware BEFORE making as assignment. I suspect that the details about your hardware and software happens AFTER, but I'm not sure. (Such an enhancement has been discussed but I don't know the final status.) In any case, the current method of providing pot-luck assignments to both classes of CPUs is working and there's a long queue of enhancement requests and FAH's development resources are in short supply.

[mikros]

It seems that core A4 isn't compliant with notebooks as it doesn't support cpu-usage- (>1 cpu cores) or pause-on-battery-commands.
I disables pause-on-battery, but the core ignores this.
With A7 I can use 3/4 cpu cores without heat problems, but with A4 only 1/4 due to cpu-usage command being ignored by A4.

Could we have use-notebook etc. command that would allow to use cores that works with notebooks?

PS. Yes, I know that FAH is designed to be used with Linux desktop computers and servers mainly. I can see this from GUI being from the 90's and screen saver being disabled for Windows users in the current version (7.5.1) for several months now.

[Joe_H]

That is news to me. I have been running F@h on my laptops for over 10 years and never had that kind of problem with the A4 core. Nor was it a problem with the A3 core before it. So I suspect a setup error on your part.

If you are using the long since removed cpu-usage setting that was for a percentage of a CPU core, that only ever worked properly with the old single CPU cores such as core 78. It does not work with the A7 core either, if it appears to be doing so, it is not actually working the way you think it is. The coup-usage setting was removed from FAHControl specifically for that reason.

As for being designed for Linux desktops, you have misinterpreted what you observed. The design is based on using software tools that are common to all three supported OS's - Windows, OS X and Linux. That saves time and programming costs by having essentially one source to deal with, just needing to have some OS specific modules to work on each.

[JimboPalmer]

Odd, I have 6 Windows laptops running F@H and have no trouble with either A4 or A7 using all CPUs. Have you considered a laptop stand?

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00WRDS8H0