I've been reading a few articles and posts on SW's usage of multiple cores. From what I've been reading is that during general usage, not rendering, not FEA, simulation etc., that SW does NOT use more than one core. I've read 1 or 1.5. That "Should" show up as two to three cores under the resource monitor with hyper threading.

This arose from a problem where someone here was having their system appear to lock and when switching to the task manager all cores where getting spiked. He was working with a large assembly and we were trying to figure out what was taking so long.

The guy from the IT department was in and I mentioned that SW only used one core. He then stated that SW uses all the cores, which I did not think was correct.

I then did some checking on my system and when I do something it would "Appear" that it something happens on most of the cores but this may just be "ancillary" activity not actually SW using those cores.

So the question is does SW use all cores, some cores, bring in processes that it requires that may use other cores or some combination.The two pics below are my machine. First is nothing really happening except background stuff. The second is same machine with me continually rotating an assembly in SW. It appears to only be intensely using one core, assuming that CPU4 is the hyperthreaded version of CPU0. But it also ticks up activity on all the other cores. Are these ancillary tasks being brought in by SW or actual usage by SW? If a person did a function in SW and suddenly all the cores spiked what should one look at as the culprit?