My AMD 9590 CPU has 8 processor cores. Each one can be busy on different tasks. I ran taskinfo http://www.iarsn.com/taskinfo/tskinf10_0.exe (an AMAZING free utility) which shows CPU utilization per core.
I let the PSP Effects Browser render (CPU-intensive) thumbnails for about 30 seconds. No activity other than PSP appears on the utilization graphs:
Here's a larger view: http://flksite.com/luxi/multiproc.jpg
As you can see, PSP does use parallel processing in a multicore computer.
The burst of activity, most easily seen in the graph of CPU zero, shows that all eight cores were doing work. I doubt that the CPUs were used efficiently, though, because none of them were saturated and some did barely any work at all.
Also interesting (to me, anyway): The graph for Memory-Mapped I/O is activity on the swap (paging) file. Even though I have 32G of memory, Windows memory allocator is so crappy that it causes a lot of swap activity anyway, no matter what it's doing.
To speed that up, I have the windows paging file on a RAM disk. That's a disk drive simulated in memory. Programs can read and write from it just like it was a physical hard drive. That way, everything happens in memory which is about 100 times gaster than a physical disk. It really speeds up boot—and everything else!
As you can see from the value of "Max Swap KB" on the right side of the screen cap, my PC has done over a gigabyte of swapfile I/O in memory instead of a slow disk.
I also put the Windows and PSP temp file folders on the RAM disk. I cannot describe how fast things are when it all happens in 2.4 GHz memory on a 5 GHz processor. Unzipping even big files happens almost instantaneously, too, since it used temp files heavily.
There are probably several ramdisk programs available that allow you to put the paging file on a RAM disk, but I use WinRamTech's RAMdisk, Full Version. http://winramtech.atwebpages.com/RAMDriv/ramdriv.htm
After installing the ramdisk, go to Ctrl Panel ➜ System ➜ Advanced System Settings (on the left) ➜ Advanced tab ➜ Performance Settings ➜ Advanced ➜ Change. Set all drives to "No paging file" and set your RAM drive paging file to System Managed Size. Note that it will only use as much of the ram drive as it needs.
You can place the temp file folder there too, by editing the registry. Just search for the key "tmp". Near it will be another key where you can set TEMP to the same folder. Make sure you change all occurrences.
Note that I also direct all my downloads to the ram disk so that install/setup programs run very fast and go away when I turn off my PC. This reduces file fragmentation and prevents the buildup of a huge download directory full of install files I'll never need.
☺,
-Lux
He was interpreting the information contained in the Windows10 blog posts from the Windows10 development team in an article he (Bott) wrote to correct myths surrounding what the various performance metrics (viewed in the new Win10 Task Manager) mean.
Whew, time sure flies.... 
