photo credit: Ioan Sameli

All this goes quite transparently, but in some cases, you may be willing to influence this for your own purposes and I found two situations that can be easily tweaked with the help of the following tools.

Process Tamer is a tiny (140k) and super efficient utility for Microsoft Windows that runs in your system tray and constantly monitors the CPU usage of other processes. When it sees a process that is overloading your CPU, it reduces the priority of that process temporarily, until its CPU usage returns to a reasonable level. That way, you avoid seeing one program hugging all the CPU to death.

Exactly on the opposite, it may happen that you want to strongly favor the process that is running in front of you. It may be a game, your spreadsheet program or anything else. MZ CPU Accelerator automatically boosts foreground apps without your changing of internal setting.

With these, you are ready to tame your process for sure.

As said before, this is a great way for AMD to differentiate itself, but the prices are not expected to go down immediately. Either because AMD does not want to shoot itself in the foot or because the quantities will not be huge for a few more weeks.

Let’s wait for the next price war between Intel and AMD, remembering that most games do not take advantage of more than 2 cores.