What generation of P4s will support dual processin

[MadHatter]

It appears that this first generation of P4s will not support dual processing. Will the next generation of P4s (Northwood?) in mid 2001 be able to do dual processing? If not... which P4 will? I haven't heard anything on P4s supporting parallel processing

Victor

 

[Guest]

I think the P4 itself is SMP capable (if not, then that's just further proof of current gen. P4 being a transitional product) but is lacking a SMP chipset

 

[MadHatter]

Hmm... I'm sorry, I'm not sure what is "SMP" ? Could you explain further?

Thanks

 

[rcf84]

SMP - Snyc. Multi processing

Its when a 2 cpu's work on something together. like when you play a mp3(256k quality)and quake3(of course the sound disable) at the same time. With a single processor it will hang so your fps goes down. (even the athlon "sad to say") so with SMP. Then share the load 1 processor will play the mp3) and the other would play quake3. uping your fps and music would sound better.

Only some OS support smp

Supported:
Win NT 4 , 2000
Linux
Unix
Beos

Doesnt support
Win 95
win 98
win ME

so if you go smp win 2000 or linux or even have both

 

[DSutcliffe]

I don't mean to insult as that is not what I am doing. but you really couldn't be more wrong.

SMP = Symmetric MultiProcessing

The process you described is Asymmetric processing where 2 cpu's work on completely different tasks.

SMP is when the 2 cpu's share the load for every task that is running on the computer.

Sorry, but I did not want such a huge amount of misinformation to be spread on this forum.

 

[MadHatter]

Thank you DSutcliffe, for the clarification. I did not know there were two seperate configurations for having dual processors. Which would be the most common configuration?

Does this mean if you have SMP, all programs running on that machine will benefit considerably from having dual processors?

 

[Guest]

Even so, you really need multithreaded program to fully benefit from using SMP system. Right now, 95% of the program are not written multithreaded.

Q3A while listening to MP3 is not very practical. I haven't seen anyone doing so

Surfing while listening to MP3 is common, but even Uniprocessor system can do it fine.

I can't think of any task that requires me to get SMP system to work on to be honest.

 

[MadHatter]

So then it would really be better for me to buy an Asymmetric processing dual CPU system, for multi-tasking?

 

[Guest]

I think all multi-processor platforms can do both the multi-threading within a program and running two CPU intensive program concurrently tricks. It's all up to the OS.

Oh and an example of multi-threaded program is 3DSMAX's renderer.

 

[MadHatter]

Hmm... so SMP and asymmetric processing is not a setting you configure on the hardware itself? It's something that is handle by the OS automatically?

If this is true... then it leads back to my original question, does anybody know when the P4 will support dual processors?

 

[DSutcliffe]

The most common is with SMP and all programs do benefit as long as the OS is SMP compliant.

After I posted the last message, I did a little more research and found that the difference between SMP and asymmetric MP is more to do with hardware where in Asymmetric the 2 processors can have there own memory and run at different clocks even.

While SMP the 2 processors share the same memory and run clocked alike.

Hope this is the info you are looking for.

 

[Guest]

(oops... didn't see your subsequent correction/clarification) This forum with the 1|2|show all pages format is weird... (snip my correction)

The CPUs will be working on "completely different tasks" if the programs running on the OS are not multithreaded. It's up to the OS to decide when to switch processes amongst available processors.

Noises in my head are recalling something I read about Mac OS using 2 processors, but only dispatching certain enabled applications to the second processor and not symmetrically balancing all applications and OS threads amongst the two. Is this what you're calling "asymmetric processing"?

I may be totally wrong about the Mac deal, so Mac users don't have a cow if I'm recalling it incorrectly. I believe Rhapsody or Mac OS X or whatever will be fully SMP capable, though.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by defcon on 12/03/00 01:39 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Guest]

I think the first multi-processor P4 will be the Foster in may be H2 of 2001