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Date:      Tue, 14 Dec 1999 22:07:04 -0600 (CST)
From:      David Scheidt <dscheidt@enteract.com>
To:        Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>
Cc:        Jamie Bowden <ragnar@sysabend.org>, Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>, noslenj@swbell.net, chat@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: dual 400 -> dual 600 worth it?
Message-ID:  <Pine.NEB.3.96.991214215754.44414A-100000@shell-1.enteract.com>
In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.19991214174918.04736140@localhost>

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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



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