Re: Multithreading question

[Matteo Morini]

Well, the thread is getting a little bit too hardware-oriented for me to 
follow; still I'd like to give you my 2c.

If what you need from your model is a noticeable performance boost I'm 
afraid you have no other choice than making it able to run on multiple 
cpus (or virtual cpus, if I  understand correctly what HT is about), but 
*splitting it into multiple processes*. I'm quite sure partitioning OS 
tasks to one of the virtual cpus in an HT physical cpu (or one of the 
physical cpus in a 'proper' MP pc) is not that big advantage, since I 
doubt your OS has much else to do besides idling and routing some stray 
interrupt, when there aren't other 'heavy' processes running on the 
machine, unless you have a big deal of I/O caused by your code 
(continuous disk access? Network traffic?). This is especially true, 
IMHO, when we're talking about >3Ghz processors.

Cheers, Matteo

Darold Higa wrote:

[snip]

> I understand that Intel's HT will give some boost in performance even if your 
> application is a monolithic block since OS tasks are partitioned off to one of 
> the virtual processors.
>  
[snip]

> Darold Higa

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