So you're setting them to spread over three cores? As in 123,234,345,456,567,678 etc?
... then 781, 812 to finish-off.
Yes that is precisely what the automine.bat program does. There is a refinement in as much as when the number of cores is a multiple of 4 it will wrap around itself to saturate a group of four cores. E.g on an eight-core machine it would go:-
123, 234, 341, 412 then 567, 678, 785, 856
The only reason that I wrote it in such a way was for mathematical convenience when dealing with hex affinity masks. If you start crunching the numbers yourself you will see what I mean
The net result is exactly the same as going 123,234,345,456,567,678,781,812 since each core is used three times in either regime.
It is certainly possible to start multiple instances of minerd without specifying a processor affinity mask at all, thus letting Windows make all those decisions for you at runtime, but it tends to make a pig's ear of it. You end up with a chaotic mess which fails to fully utilize the CPU and generates inconsistent hashrates. Everything seems to run smoother when you take control and do a proper job on it.
