From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Apr 6 11:47:51 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from fw.wintelcom.net (ns1.wintelcom.net [209.1.153.20]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D45FF37B926 for ; Thu, 6 Apr 2000 11:47:49 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from bright@fw.wintelcom.net) Received: (from bright@localhost) by fw.wintelcom.net (8.10.0/8.10.0) id e36JDKD15964; Thu, 6 Apr 2000 12:13:20 -0700 (PDT) Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 12:13:20 -0700 From: Alfred Perlstein To: R Joseph Wright Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: smp motherboards/concepts Message-ID: <20000406121319.E22104@fw.wintelcom.net> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0.1i In-Reply-To: ; from rjoseph@speakeasy.org on Thu, Apr 06, 2000 at 11:32:53AM -0700 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG * R Joseph Wright [000406 12:07] wrote: > I know FreeBSD supports multiple processors, but how many? What > motherboard(s) support more than two, for example using a pentium pro? People have been known to use FreeBSD in quad processor systems. > > Is the concept of SMP similar to beowulf clusters? I've read a little > about those, and as I understand, simply clustering many computers together > does not guarantee a faster system, if the software is not especially > compiled to handle it. Is this also true of SMP? I'm specifically > thinking of using an SMP system for doing raytracing. The SMP you get with FreeBSD would be multiple processors in a single system, unless you can break down your raytracing application into multiple processes to act on different threads at the same time you won't see any improvement. -- -Alfred Perlstein - [bright@wintelcom.net|alfred@freebsd.org] "I have the heart of a child; I keep it in a jar on my desk." To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message