There's an insightful comment by GreenCat in the SetProcessAffinityMask documentation about how doing this in Windows is likely to hurt your performance: http:/

There's an insightful comment by GreenCat in the SetProcessAffinityMask documentation about how doing this in Windows is likely to hurt your performance: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms686223%28v=vs.85%29.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms68... In fact, this seems like a Prisoner's Dilemma problem with the OS having programs cooperate by default. There's a chance you'll speed up your application by locking it to a core (defecting), but only if none of the other applications try the same thing.