Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] interesting note on quad core chips

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Jack Smith wrote:

> > For most cases it's not that hard to write a multi-threaded program
> > anyway. If nothing else write each thread as it's own service and
> > enable your services to communicate as needed. Problems that don't
> > easily divide into services are usually easily parallelized stuff like
> > 3D rendering. It's not like we have 100 core processors right now
> > where you'd want to start splitting normal logic down into parallel
> > tracks to peak every lil bit of power out of the system. 
>
> It can get quite tricky with certain algorithms to write MP code.
> Sometimes MP code will be slower than single-threaded code due to the
> thread syncing taking up an enormous amount of resources.

I write multithreaded programs.  I tend to write CPU floating point 
intensive scientific programs (solving various partial differential 
equations).  Like Jack, I can tell you that writing MP code is 
definitely not an easy chore.

Also, note to Jack - in the last six months or so, the FreeBSD project 
have really made tremendous advances in getting their OS to get maximum 
usage out of MP code.  In my opinion, FreeBSD now beats Linux rather 
handily (it used to be the other way round, and by a long shot). 
Somehow the FreeBSD project really managed to get the thread syncing to 
take far fewer resources than it used to.

Stephen

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