Support for multi-core processors

Issue

You are using a computer with a multi-core processor, and you have noticed that the Inventor.exe process does not use 100% of your available CPU resources. You want to know if Autodesk® Inventor™ supports multi-core processors.

Solution

Autodesk Inventor 2009 and later versions support multi-core technology in some very specific areas of the product, including:

• Animations and renderings in Studio
• Stress Analysis (ANSYS or FEAComputeServer processes)
• ASM (Autodesk Shape Manager) kernel
• Task Scheduler

In order to fully benefit from multi-core processors, you need to use multi-threaded software. Unfortunately, Inventor is currently a single-threaded application.

On a dual-core computer, a CPU-intensive operation that uses 100% of the resources of a single-core processor will only use a maximum of 50% of the CPU for that same operation on a dual-core computer, and only 6% of each CPU on a 16-core computer. This is shown in the following image:

Due to the lack of multi-threading, Inventor is not capable of using more than 50% of the CPU on a dual-core computer, so there is no significant performance gain over a single CPU computer.

The only way to take advantage of a dual-core processor when using Inventor is to run multiple Inventor sessions on your computer.

Starting in Inventor 2009, you can, however, use multiple processes in Task Scheduler by clicking Settings menu > Multiple Processes.

The number of processes you can use is not limited to the number of processors available. If desired, you can increase the number of processes until 100% CPU activity is achieved on all of the processors.