I might take a bit of this last one up with you Tom, that be there Winblows thinking... about SMP anyway. I promise there is a marked difference between an SMP machine doing anything in MDK-Linux, and the same machine with out 2 cpus. in Winblows, including W2kp, and XP, if they ain't special SMP aware apps, there ain't no value, but in MDK, everything (when really loading up the box) is faster SMP. the visual difference is roughly the same as going from 128 meg ram to 256 meg ram, as UP vs SMP
Sorry, jumping in on this thread late. The above is just routine anti-Microsoft chestbeating. I use both Win2k/XP and Linux, like to think of myself as platform-neutral. Both have strengths and weaknesses. The assertion that Win2k/XP do not take advantage of a second CPU except for rare SMP-specific applications is just plain false. The scheduler in 2k/XP is actually pretty good about exploiting the 2nd CPU even for things as simple as the console. I got my first dual CPU board on a whim when I fried my motherboard, and I'll never go back to a single CPU system - and I run no apps that were specifically written for SMP. Even on my lowly dual 233MMX (waiting for the workstation Opteron boards), Win2k is very responsive about bringing new apps to the foreground. That's what SMP brings to a general desktop - responsiveness. Even if you have some long running process you just started, clicking on some other window will produce immediate action. On a single CPU, such a context switch might take a second or two.
-- Guy Rouillier
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