How To Force Windows Applications to Use a Specific CPU

CPU pinning enables the binding and unbinding of a process or thread to a physical CPU or a range of CPU's, so that the process or thread will execute only on the designated CPU or CPU's rather than being able to execute on any CPU. This means that you limit the application to only run on certain logical processors, which can come in terribly handy if you have an application that is hogging all the CPU.

Changing a Process’s Affinity

1. Right-click on the Windows taskbar and launch Task Manager.





2. Switch over to the details tab.





3. Find your process in the list, right-click on it and choose Set affinity.





4. By default, all apps are allowed to span all the processors in your PC.





5. Just uncheck the ones you don’t want it to run on and click Ok.