Core Failure
Written 2009-06-28
Tags:Pentium D Multi-core processor Central processing unit Hardware Components htop hyperthreading
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.