>This is SOP in the history of software development: the software grows to >take advantage of the excess capacity of the hardware...
Sometimes, eventually it does. Sometimes it doesn't. Programming for multi-processors or multi-cores can be very tricky. Some obvious things are easy to do -- like having the OS assign different programs to different processors. But when it comes to splitting up tasks within one program it can get messy. You have to deal with things like race condtions and error recovery when one of many threads dies. The last go-around we had multi-processors for a few years and the software never caught up. Instead the reason for multi-processors evaporated and they went away. So anyone who was trying to solve the difficult problems of coding for them was wasting their time. With that history, nobody is racing to do the heavy lifting on multi-cores. Much of the time the additional cores sit idle or run at a very low percentage of their capacity. ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
