Re: OT Dual core CPUs versus faster single core CPUs?
- From: John Larkin <jjlarkin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 02 May 2008 20:42:49 -0700
On Fri, 2 May 2008 19:11:49 -0700 (PDT), rickman <gnuarm@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
On May 1, 8:28 pm, John Larkin
<jjlar...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The real use for multiple cores will to be to assign one function per
core. One would be the OS kernal, and only that, and would be entirely
protected from other processes. Other cores could be assigned to be
specific device drivers, file managers, TCP/IP socket managers, things
like that. Then one core could be assigned to each application process
or thread. Only a few cores need floating-point horespower, which
might be hardware shared. Power down idle cores. Voila, no context
switching, no memory corruption, and an OS that never crashes.
Microsoft won't like it at all.
John
Good luck on that "never crashes" thing. How do you think a given CPU
will get its program?
The OS cpu will assign it a task, create its memory image, set up its
privileges, and kick it off. And snoop it regularly to make sure it's
behaving.
How does it know it is a device driver rather
than an application?
See above.
How does memory *not* get shared? Main memory
will never be on the CPU chip, at least not as long as they want to
keep increasing performance at a low cost.
Hardware memory management can keep any given CPU from damaging
anything but its own application space. Intel has just begun to
recognize - duh - that it's not a good idea to execute data or stacks,
or to allow apps to punch holes in their own code. Allowing things
like buffer overflow exploits is simply criminal.
Multi CPUs is nothing new. It has been done for ages. In fact one of
the very first computers was a multi-processor machine. The problem
is that it is very hard to use many CPUs efficiently. We are bumping
up against some real limitations in CPU speed improvements. So we
have to start using multiple CPUs. But these are also inefficient.
We are reaching an age where progress will be coming slower and with
more cost and pain.
But speed is no longer the issue for most users. Reliability is. We
need to get past worrying about using every transistor, or even every
CPU core, 100%, and start making systems manageable and reliable.
Since nobody seem able to build reliability or security into complex
software systems, and the mess isn't getting any better (anybody for
Vista?) we need to let hardware - the thing that *does* work - assume
more responsibility for system integrity.
What else are we going to do with 256 CPUs on one chip?
John
who just rebooted a hung XP. Had to power cycle the stupid thing. But
I'm grateful that it, at least, came back up.
.
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