Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 14 Apr 1999 12:33:01 -0400 (EDT) | From | Vladimir Dergachev <> | Subject | Re: SMP vs. Specialized chipsets WAS: Re: I have information/driver ... |
| |
On Tue, 13 Apr 1999 bwoodard@cisco.com wrote:
> This long thread about the evils of winmodems has made me wonder about > two things. > > 1) Why shouldn't hardware engineers make cheap peripherals which > require significant CPU assist and then just have an extra CPU around > to ensure that the user experience is responsive while one CPU is > doing things like the modem or sound processing. It seems to me that a > cheap SMP box would be much more useful than a computer with a whole > bunch of seldom used specialized chips in it. I'd love to have my > kernel compiles double in speed just by shutting down my modem or > sound card. >
It makes some sense. The problem is that soundcard chip costs about $10 and even cheap cpu's from AMD are about $40. You'll see the difference when you compare the die size. However the advantage of software implementation is that you can change your hardware on the fly. I think most manufacturers like the idea that they can cure a hardware bug by simply issuing a patch.
> This brings me to my second question about SMP: > > 2) Why don't CPU designers revisit the RISC revolution and make much > simpler processors with shallower (simpler) pipelines and then pack > two or four processors on one die creating one chip that would appear > to the kernel as a four processors. Then let you kernel developers > play with locking and the application software developers multithread > their code to take advantage of it. It seems to me like it moves the > problem of speed optimzation into software where it is much easier to > profile and tweak. It could be that many of the fancy tweaks built > into microprocessors today might not be getting used all that often > because of lagging compiler technology or because the designer thought > something was important when in fact it is rarely used in modern > code. How do we know that the Pentium II or III is not just chocked > full of bloat etched into silicon? >
VLIW - Very long instruction word.
Of chips I can remember are Merced, some HP processor, and that Elbrus stuff (from Russia). Also probably Transmeta is doing this.
You can get more info at http://infopad.eecs.berkeley.edu/CIC/
Vladimir Dergachev
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |