MorphOS Developer
Posts: 1107 from 2003/6/11
From: Białystok...
Quote:
Ruud wrote:
This is interesting...in what way and to what extent could Morphos make use of extra cores without SMP?
The same way as PowerUp used two different processors. I see it as a library allowing for launching processes, or even an extension to dos.library. IPC may be integrated in exec. In fact supporting multiple cores of one processor is easier than PowerUp because of following reasons:
1. Cores are identical, so you need not to use different compiler. You may write the same code which runs on both single core and multicore systems.
2. Cache coherency between cores is ensured by hardware.
Disadvantages are:
1. Only new applications using the extension may take advantage of multiple cores (on the other hand it does not break compatibility). Old apps will run on "main" core only.
2. Programmer should desing an application multithreaded way (but this is also needed for systems with SMP as far as I know).
