from dmesg I get these lines
smpboot: CPU0: Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N450 @ 1.66GHz (fam: 06, model: 1c, stepping: 0a)

smpboot: Booting Node 0, Processors #1

Brought up 2 CPUs

smpboot: Total of 2 processors activated (6649.85 BogoMIPS)

from lspci I get
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Atom Processor D4xx/D5xx/N4xx/N5xx Integrated Graphics Controller

00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Atom Processor D4xx/D5xx/N4xx/N5xx Integrated Graphics Controller

the display adapter is built in to the CPU how come I have 2 display adapters
even /proc/cpuinfo shows processor 0 and 1 both running at different speeds

the specs all of them I have found say single CPU so who's right
the kernel or the spects
it's a HP mini 210-1040NR

It's a single physical core with two threads. See "hyperthreading" for an explanation.
http://ark.intel.com/products/42503/...Cache-1_66-GHz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading

My experience with a very similar processor showed that hyperthreading just slowed things down, even when running a single high-CPU process on a single thread. With HT enabled, it would use ~140% CPU (out of 200%) according to top and would regularly fall behind real time and miss data. With HT disabled, it would use ~80% CPU (out of 100%) and would never miss a beat. Depending on what you do with the machine you might consider disabling it, but you should test to see how your workload compares with and without first.

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so how would I go about disabling it ?
I have some bugs with KDE when doing a lot of disk top switching and switching from X to a VT and back that it may be causing

You would disable it in the machine's BIOS menu. Hit F10 or whatever it is on boot and you should find it buried in the menu system.

don't have that option in the BIOS
found this on line

echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu1/online
BUT the path is wrong it should be
echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/online
added it to /etc/rc.d/rc.local

every thing about this computer seems faster even loading web pages

That takes the CPU offline, but leaves all the scheduler "plumbing". Look at adding nr_cpus=1 to kernel parms to ensure it can never come back online.

I'm going to build another kernel anyway I always do to speed up booting
maybe a better option would be to turn it off in the kernel build
by not building SMP in to the kernel haven't found hyper threading in menuconfig

I'd just leave the HT enabled and leave SMP on. That system is so slow to being with, I doubt you'll gain anything from all that work. I guess it would be worth a test.


A number of years ago HT was really bad. Software now has caught up with it if you are running a modern distro.