How do cores affect processing speed?

Modern processors can do more than one thing at once due to having multiple cores.  The computer sees these cores as individual processors so instructions can be sent to each independently.  A processor can essentially double its cores again if they are hyper threaded.  Therefore a 6 core hyper threaded processor will look like a 12 core processor.  NoteCaddy makes extensive use of multiple cores/processors to complete its tasks more quickly.  For more information on how to optimize NoteCaddy to work as well as possible please see NoteCaddy speed improvement.

How much do having more cores help NoteCaddy note creation speed?  Using my Intel i7 990x processor, I set it to 2,4,8,12 cores to simulate what different processors might produce.  This was done on a hand sample of around 90k cash hands.

As you can see, processing speed does not double when threads do.  This is because the biggest bottleneck NoteCaddy runs into is saving its notes to your database.  NoteCaddy creates large amounts of data that needs to be persisted.  So in conclusion if you want to get the biggest bang for your buck get a solid state disk drive with fast write speeds!