[botmeister]

Good questions but I don't really have a good answer for you, although I'll give it a shot anyway.

My understanding of HT is that it fools the OS into thinking there are two CPU's instead of one (or 4 instead of 2 with a dual CPU system), so my assumption is that Windows will assign virtual CPU 0 & 1 to the physical CPU 0 and virtual CPU 2 & 3 to the physical CPU 1.

If I were to mix and match processes, I'd try and assign dissimilar processes to each virtual CPU on the same pysical CPU in an effort maximize idle time resource sharing (that's my understanding of what HT does).

If each process is the same (eg copies of an HL2 process) then I'd try and do load balancing by assigning (for example) a heavily used game and a less heavily used game to the same physical CPU (eg virtual CPU 1 & 2 or 3 & 4).

Nothing beats experimentation however, so the above is just my best guess without actually trying it out.

Now that I'm thinking about it, what may be useful is to allow the CPU assignments to be automatically adjusted based on load statistics in an effort to perform some kind of load balancing optimization. That would be kinda cool I think.