For large and medium designs, the time it takes to calculate diagnostics can now be reduced significantly by calculating fault isolation for multiple detection tests at the same time. Using two new diagnostic status dialogs, you can specify the number of processing threads to be used when calculating isolation. The number of simultaneous threads allowed is, of course, limited by the number of physical (“core”) and virtual processors that are available on your machine— generally speaking, the more powerful your machine, the more threads you can run at once.

 

On the Preferences panel of the Diagnostic Study Options dialog, you can select the status dialog to be used. There are three options—Standard, Advanced and Power.

 

With the Standard Isolation status dialog—the one that many of you have come to know and love (well, maybe not love) over the decades—processing is performed in a single thread.

 

Select the Advanced Isolation status dialog if your system supports multi-core processing. To maximize system performance, you can change the number of threads (from 1 to 10) as diagnostics are calculating.

 

Use the Power Isolation status dialog if your system has 6 or more physical core processors (and can thus run 12 or more threads in parallel). The Power dialog supports up to 64 virtual processors—the maximum currently available in a desktop system!!