Sun has high expectations for Niagara

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Would you rather go off-chip to synchronize?

a la traditional SMPs (symmetric multiprocessors) where you
have to hit the system memory bus to grab a lock potentially
held in any other processor cache? If everything is on the same
chip there's the potential for better performance. Granted, not
every computation is really suitable for a parallel execution, but
there are a lot that are, especially commercial applications
(databases, decision support, data mining, web serving, etc.)
Also, consider possibilities like:

1) parallel compilation within a single single source file: yuck!
2) parallel compilation, one thread per file: why not?

So (2) is of limited applicability if you only have a few source
files. But in the real world, how many people are just doing 'cc
hello_world.c' ? If you had 50 source code files to build your
application, do you think you might like a 32-way parallel
compile?

Another item to keep in mind is that memory latency is much
more the issue with a single thread... it's hard to keep on
trucking past a load missing memory without getting
speculative, and then all that speculative work might be tossed if
it winds up being wrong. If your there were 7 other runnable
threads or processes available, why speculate on the guy with
the miss instead of quickly switching to someone who is ready
to go?

Posted by: jefferz   Posted on: 11/05/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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