Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2001 14:13:35 -0700 (PDT) From: Rayson Ho <raysonlogin@yahoo.com> To: Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org>, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: MPP and new processor designs. Message-ID: <20010723211335.97806.qmail@web11401.mail.yahoo.com> In-Reply-To: <20010723165519.A33391@ussenterprise.ufp.org>
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You are talking about CMP (chip multi-processor) or SMT (Simultaneous Multi-Threading)!! Please look at the design of IBM Power4. Rayson --- Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org> wrote: > > A number of new chips have been released lately, along with some > enhancements to existing processors that all fall into the same > logic of parallelizing some operations. Why, just today I ran > across an article about > http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/3/20576.html, > which bosts 128 ALU's on a single chip. > > This got me to thinking about an interesting way of using these > chips. Rather than letting the hardware parallelize instructions > from a single stream, what about feeding it multiple streams of > instructions. That is, treat it like multiple CPU's running two > (or more) processes at once. > > I'm sure the hardware isn't quite designed for this at the moment > and so it couldn't "just be done", but if you had say 128 ALU's > most single user systems could dedicate one ALU to a process > and never context switch, in the traditional sense. For systems > that run lots of processors the rate limiting on a single process > wouldn't be a big issue, and you could gain lots of effiencies > in the global aspect by not context-switching in the traditional > sense. > > Does anyone know of something like this being tried? Traditional > 2-8 way SMP systems probably don't have enough processors (I'm > thinking 64 is a minimum to make this interesting) and require > other glue to make multiple independant processors work together. > Has anyone tried this with them all in one package, all clocked > together, etc? > > -- > Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org > Systems Engineer - Internetworking Engineer - CCIE 3440 > Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request@tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Make international calls for as low as $.04/minute with Yahoo! Messenger http://phonecard.yahoo.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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