Excel only uses 50% of processing power???

[cdcushman]

While running a lengthy calculation in Excel today at work,
I realized through task manager, that Excel.exe was only utilizing 50% of my processor and the other 50% was System Idle. I Tried setting priority Higher and saw no change in calculation/processor useage. Can someone help??? Is there a way to change this in Excel. If so I haven't been able to find it... yet.

 

[MrChad]

Do you have a hyperthreaded processor?

 

[cdcushman]

Yes

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: cdcushman
Yes

There's your answer.

 

[cdcushman]

Explain...
Please?

 

[nweaver]

excel is a single threaded application. Disable hyperthreading and it will "magiclly" take 100%

Excel would only use 100% of a single CPU in a dual CPU setup. If you combine the CPU's, and one is at 100%, the other is at 0%, it works out to an average of 50% CPU Usage (just like you, wow).

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: cdcushman
Explain... Please?

The calculation was running on one thread. Each thread can use (at most) 100% of the cpu power on one processor. As you have two logical CPU's, XP reports 50% utilization.

That said, since your hyperthreaded and not multi or dual core, you can really only get about 120% total performance over a non HT system with two threads pegging the CPU. So the graph is a bit off (as it doesn't factor in physical vs logical CPU's).

In short, your calculation was running as fast as possible on your system. Taskmanager was underreporting the actual usage since it doesn't know how to otherwise report it on these systems.

Bill

 

[cdcushman]

Thank you!