Core Failure
Written 2009-06-28
Tags:hyperthreading Central processing unit Multi-core processor Hardware Pentium D htop Components
So, for the past few days, my computer has been acting very strangely. It often locked up or rebooted all by itself. Today I finally learned what had caused it. I happen to own of the earlier dual-core processors, a Pentium D with hyperthreading. Running HTOP, I could see only 2 processors, where there should be four. Usually, CPUs in linux count first the real cores, then the virtual cores. In my computer, Cores 0 and 2 were the only ones running. I feared a corrupted bios had turned off my second core, but alas, Core 1 is dead. I'm quite happy with the fail-state though. Once the core completely died, my computer is running fine...well, half as fast as it used to, but it's still pretty good.