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| Christopher Browne wrote:
> After a long battle with technology, mlw <mlw@nospam.no>, an earthling,
> wrote:
>
> It's a new acronym that Sun and Intel are evidently using to describe
> the usage of their multicore CPUs.
>
>
>
> Well, that means that you're not going to get much value out of trying
> to multithread (or multitask) a sort.
>
> I sure wouldn't have expected sorting to be an example of an
> application that would improve performance by spawning helper
> processes.
Sorting is probably one of the best examples of how an application with one
logical progression could be made faster. Say you have to sort a large
array of data, say one million entries. If you have a 4 CPU box, you could
divide the array into 4 segments, and sort each, then merge the four
results into a single set. Since sorting time is usually non-linear, i.e.
the more you have the more processing is required, this is a big win.
>
>
> That's not what I'm thinking of.
>
> What I was thinking of was more along the lines that complex apps like
> Mozilla and OpenOffice.org lend themselves to having plenty of
> components that it would make sense to spawn as separate processes
> that could invisibly take advantage of SMP.
>
> For instance, Mozilla has to split off threads to do such things as:
[snip]
The problem is that when someone enters a URL, and hits enter, there is a
single logical progression until the page is displayed.
>
> I'm not sure what is the "perfect" architecture, but I can easily see
> Mozilla splitting into half a dozen processes. That would _easily_
> spread it across more CPUs in a multiprocessor context.
I'm not sure it would be any faster.
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