Re: Regarding Dual core processors

On Sun, 18 Mar 2007 18:16:59 -0600, Dennis <dennis@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Chris Hills wrote:

Well in most multi tasking systems there is only 1 MCU. And you time
slice. So many miliseconds per task to give the illusion of lots os
things happening at once.

The idea with the PC dual, quad core etc is that you really can have
several tasks in parallel. It can give a speed increase.

It is great fun to talk to Windows programmers who think that because
they have been "multi tasking" and "threading" for years that multicore
processors will just work. They will soon find out that the fact there
was only one real processor covered up a lot of concurrency and
synchronization bugs.

Motherboards with two or four x86 CPUs have been available since
1990's, mainly intended for server applications.

Anyone serious about writing multithreading applications would have
been able to test concurrency issues before any HyperThreading etc.
CPUs arrived.

Paul

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