Dieter wrote:
In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, James Richard Tyrer writes:
So, as I said, you don't need a powerful processor just to run the X server.
Some early X terminals used a 68k and were fast enough.
Is
someone credited with the law that states that 4 500 MHz CPUs cost less
than 1 2 GHz CPU (I first saw it with much lower speeds :-))?
The usual reason is that you can't *get* a 4x faster CPU.
Yes, that that isn't the issue here.
There is more than the cost of the CPUs themselves to consider.
Building a SMP machine and getting it right is non-trivial.
In this case (OpenGL accelerator), this would not really be SMP but
rather a +/- SIMD system which could have some local data memory. Yes,
a SIMD system has dispatch issues (some systems have a dispatch CPU) but
this is not as complicated as SMP. With simpler graphics systems, this
is simple, if you have 4 processors, you give each of them 1/4 of the
screen. OpenGL isn't that simple.
One of the reasons that SMP systems don't scale proportionately is that
the processors compete for memory access. It should be noted that this
is also the reason that faster clock speeds don't scale proportionately
-- memory access becomes the limiting factor.
--
JRT
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