What is Digg?Sponsored by Dragon Age: Origins
Follow the Dragon Age: Origins development team on Twitter view!
twitter.com/DragonAge - EA presents BioWare's new dark fantasy epic Dragon Age: Origins. '9/10' from Game Informer.
22 Comments
- praisethelard, on 06/06/2008, -9/+38Sorry to break it to you, but you just dugg an article about ethnic cleansing.
- falloutsyndrome, on 10/12/2007, -2/+19+dugg for intelligent title and description. Hell if I understand it though.
- rotarychainsaw, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12Was it for or against?
- falloutsyndrome, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5DAMNIT . . . third time this week.
- ZPWeeks, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7My SMP system runs like trash under Windows, and is a beauty with Linux. Feels like a completely different machine with all of that multitasking power...
It'll be interesting to see how their virtualization stuff turns out over the next six months or so, it's be nice to go all linux but at the moment it's not practical for my specific needs. - AllEvil669, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5Well written article. Would not expect anything else from IBM. They know as well as anyone how much better a UNIX or Linux based OS performs on SMP and cluster systems.
- monkeyhoward, on 10/12/2007, -4/+6I know I'm going to get slammed for this but I can't help myself. The BeOS had native SMP 10 years ago and you did not have to do anything special during application development to exploit it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS
And yes, I'm still mad about the demise of what could have been the coolest OS ever.
I can only imagine what that OS could do with a new dual core system
I'll take my beating now......... - devinbunker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@geronimo
Just a little note to go with your comment about each processor handling a different device:
By default, the Linux kernel will assign a single CPU to handle all interrupts (i.e. input from devices). If you look at /proc/interrupts on an SMP system, you'll see that every interrupt is assigned to the first processor, CPU0: eth0 (network card), libata (SATA drive), ohci_* (USB), etc... You can manually override this behavior through the /proc/irq/* interface, though. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2On Linux, many things take advantage of multiple processors to varying degrees. Many applications fork processes or threads, and these can be dispatched on separate CPUs/cores. Even monolithic processes can indirectly benefit, when running multiple applications concurrently (each can be dispatched on a different CPU).
I'm running a typical Linux desktop, using about a dozen applications with a total of over 200 processes. Those two hundred processes could be distributed over all the CPUs I have (100 on each CPU with two CPUs, 50 on each with four CPUs, for example).
When running a machine with multiple CPUs, the system becomes very "smooth"; almost zero lag. The reason is that there's much greater likelihood that a CPU will be available at the moment it's needed - even if some application is crunching away. - arjie, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I'm told Linus Torvalds does. Or so these people claim:
http://www.linuxmark.org/ - geronimo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Thank the linux kernel devs. A lot of very smart people have improved the kernel (esp. going from 2.4 to 2.6) to make linux run very well on multiple CPU machines. They have removed a bunch of global locks, improved the scheduler so that it runs in constant time. You can have 1,000,000 threads and 2,000 or 10 procs/threads running and it will still run the same, adding procs/threads alone won't bog the system down. If they're all grasping for that CPU then it can't work magic but it does to some pretty cool things, like optimize processes for interactive vs non-interactive use. With multiple CPUs, a cpu will handle the I/O for your mouse while another cpu handles the keyboard interrupt while another cpu handles a network interrupt, making it so things just run smoother.
- SNIa, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1With a high speed interconnect, such as infiniband, you can link multiple x86 machines and make them into ONE SMP machine. Rackables System does exactly this: http://www.rackable.com/products/c5100-smp.htm Multiple X86 Dual Processor boards linked by infiniband to create one machine.
- geronimo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Please link to something that goes over this, I am pretty doubtful that BeOS split single-threaded execution onto multiple CPUs.
I do see that it schedules based on heuristics that determine whether or not a process is interactive.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_zdext/is_200107/ai_ziff9533
Linux does this as well. - riccohasdug, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Speaking from the common Linux desktop OS user's point of view, what currently available apps take advantage of SMP /POSIX (besides virtualization apps, of course)?
- No1nose, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I remember BeOS back in late '99. It ran very fast. Didn't Palm buy it and kill it?
- riccohasdug, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1FTA: "In the 1980s, companies like Cray Research introduced multiprocessor systems and UNIX-like operating systems that could take advantage of them (CX-OS)"
I won't dig you down (*nix is *nix :) - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4Just a note, since it's not mentioned in the article. The x86 (32-bit) Linux systems can support up to 32 CPUs, while x86_64 (64-bit) systems can support up to 64 CPUs. No extra charge. ;-)
- rhettnyedotorg, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Don't you mean GNU/Linux?
And who owns the trademark on Linux ® that you show, with the ® Registered Trademark ® icon? - beetjebrak, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0That's silicon for chips, silicone for implants. Quite a different feel to the two.
- MOGua, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1The change from single-core to multi-core will be a cycle...
In a couple of decades, after the death of silicon (as semiconductor, not breast implants) We will be back to single processors (diamond/carbon nano tubes?) that will make the 80-core processors from our time look like child's toy.
Then we will start to push for higher frequency, smaller area, ILP...eventually leading to multi-core processors when there's nothing else we can push. - node42, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1BeOS was an incredible OS. I still have my 4.5 install disk in my drawer, and my Scott Hacker BeOS bible somewhere in my library. But do remember that some of the magic of OS was at the expense of security.
What kills me is that the article didn't mention Sun's Niagara processor with 32 hardware threads (8 cores - but only 1 FPU). That is probably today's prime example of where the industry is headed with hardware parallelism.
Anyway - I am glad there is someone else that remembers BeOS. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1I am surprised that IBM labeled a content-free, SMP-for-dummies type of article as "intermediate".
L-A-M-E!
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is