Paladin of the Pegasos
Posts: 1178 from 2003/3/13
From: Pinto, Madrid ...
Quote:Krashan wrote:
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Ruud wrote:
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.
Exactly the same thing I thought of years ago. In fact, the PowerUP framework was
more difficult than this scenario.
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I see it as a library allowing for launching processes, or even an extension to dos.library.
The "dos.library" is the one that starts processes?
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IPC may be integrated in exec
Of course, some extensions would be needed in the kernel. By the way, is anyone surprised that we are talking about SMP, and there's NO mention of Quark? MorphOS IS the A-Box, there's still a SMP capable kernel beneath, and funnily, its SMP abilities wouldn't be used.
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Cores are identical, so you need not to use different compiler.
Yes, one minor (ahem) detail, that emphzsizes just how amazing was the PowerUP system. A computer inside a computer, an operating system inside an operating system.
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Cache coherency between cores is ensured by hardware.
There's been a lot of talk about this since a long ago...
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Only new applications using the extension may take advantage of multiple cores. Programmer should desing an application multithreaded way
Of course, these are not disadvantages of this implementation, only the obvious, natural compromises, of SMP computing. For example, sometimes, doing something on several cores is actually slower than ina single one. That can't be counted as a disadvantage of the implementation, it's just life.
