From owner-freebsd-chat Tue Dec 14 20: 7:29 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from mail.enteract.com (mail.enteract.com [207.229.143.33]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0B2F215381 for ; Tue, 14 Dec 1999 20:07:25 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from dscheidt@enteract.com) Received: from shell-1.enteract.com (dscheidt@shell-1.enteract.com [207.229.143.40]) by mail.enteract.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id WAA03846; Tue, 14 Dec 1999 22:07:04 -0600 (CST) (envelope-from dscheidt@enteract.com) Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1999 22:07:04 -0600 (CST) From: David Scheidt To: Brett Glass Cc: Jamie Bowden , Terry Lambert , noslenj@swbell.net, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: dual 400 -> dual 600 worth it? In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.19991214174918.04736140@localhost> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Tue, 14 Dec 1999, Brett Glass wrote: > At 06:05 AM 12/14/1999 , Jamie Bowden wrote: > > >Can I point out that the PC isn't the only platform on the planet? When I > >was at NASA 16 processor (or more) Origin2000's and Sun Enterprise servers > >with anywhere from 200GB to 1TB+ drive arrays on them were quite common. > > > >Eventually PC's won't be single processor toys. > > Multiprocessing has always been a stopgap measure to get extra performance > out of a machine until uniprocessors caught up. The diminishing returns But uniprocessors will never catch up. The glue needed to build an N-way machine will always be less expensive than N uniprocessor boxes. N may change in value as technology changes, but the benefit of being able to share resources like memory and I/O channels wil always exist for some applications. > make tightly coupled multiprocessing far less desirable than loosely > coupled (or uncoupled!) distributed computing. For some applications loosely coupled multi-processing makes sense. For others, like operations on one datastream, it doesn't. David Scheidt To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message