Quote:
Originally posted by Miserableman
Please everyone buy these chips, so that when I want to buy one in 8 months or so I don't have to pay nearly as much.
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Miserableman is teh win.
Also, if you take an excellent SMP OS like Solaris 8/9, typically you can expect to get between 125% and 150% from a dual proc box, compared to a single proc box (being, obviously, 100%).
Most applications (and a heck of a lot of server applications) are written with no SMP in mind. 99.99% of games take no advantage of SMP. The reason why SMP is sovery popular on servers is that a lot of servers run a unix variant. Unix has the philosophy of "lots of small programmesbounce cleanup error flush lmtp local master nqmgr pickup pipe qmgr qmqpd showq smtp smtpd spawn trivial-rewrite virtual, all very good at one thing only", so a single application, say an email server, will have one process that accepts incomming mail, one process that checks whether its valid, one process that sends it to the MDA... etc
A counter example would be MS exchange server, which is one application that handles the sending, receiving, storing, filtering, sorting of mail, all functions that are taken care of by seperate processes under *nix. The hint is in the names, for email you need an MDA, an MTA and a MUA. Typically on unix, each of these tasks (possibly with the exception of the MUA, which is a users perogative anyways) are several different processes. For example, the popular MTA Postfix consists of 18 applications*, most of which are not daemons at all. Therefore, postfix will run exceedingly well on multi proc boxes (lots of small processes will get assigned and spread evenly over the processors available)
GUESS WHO HAS BEEN READING TANENBAUN'S MODERN OPERATING SYSTEMS?
* For those geeky enough to care, bounce, cleanup, error, flush, lmtp, local, master, nqmgr, pickup, pipe, qmgr, qmqpd, showq, smtp, smtpd, spawn, trivial-rewrite and virtual