Mike Cherba wrote: > I find it interesting that the article only covers one percieved facet > of mutlicore performance and doesn't really cover effective division of > work as the number of processors goes toward infinity. While SMP is a > good approach for 2 or even 4 processors, I do not believe it to be the > best approach for numbers of cores higher than that. Especially > depending on the work to be done. Once you have more than a few cores, > you can afford to specialize the tasks of each core at an even lower > level. Certain functions work best with a single CPU focused on them.
I don't understand what you're saying. Are you advocating special-purpose functional units a la PlayStation or video card, or general-purpose CPUs given special jobs by system software? > My concerns are that most software developers today do not understand > how to design applications which effectively make use of multiple > processing units. I keep hearing this. I personally know lots of people who can effectively design for SMP, NUMA or Beowulf systems. Also, some frameworks are useful for hiding concurrency from application programmers (e.g., app servers, apache+mysql). I don't think the brain shortage is as severe as it's made out to be. -- Bob Miller K<bob> kbobsoft software consulting http://kbobsoft.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
