After decades of programming I am taking my first steps in parallel process programming using as always Delphi Professional, now XE3 on a Windows 8 professional Toshiba Satellite A665 laptop.
System.cpucount returns 4, as it should.
I have now programmed some minimal test programs and copied and tried some from the web running anywhere from 1 to 16 threads simultaneously. To my surprise the processing time is, however, just the same or somewhat greater than if I simply run the same processing sequentially. I wonder if the program is using all the cores or just one, whether some special switches have to be set, etc. (I have also read somewhere that Windows does not really allow parallel use of cores?)
Multi-threading will not neccesarily increase your processing speed.
All depends on what type of processing you are doing, if one thread has to wait for resources beign used by another thread, then you dont get any speed advantage.