On Sun, 2005-12-25 at 09:34 +1100, O Plameras wrote: > James Gregory wrote: > > > > >That's exactly right. And if you compile without CONFIG_SMP, that's what > >gets built into your kernel. You can get away with it because of the > >clever way in which a CPU does one thing at a time; there is no "true" > >parallelism. > > > > By the way, is it not true that 'pipelining' that's a feature of x86 > CPU's starting > with i586 which I have pointed out in one of my previous post is > (another name) > implementation of 'parallel' processing ? This means that more than one > instructions may be > executed in one clock cycle. This is implemented by using a bus > interface unit > (BIU) and an execution unit. Experts on Intel Arch may confirm the > truthfullness or > falsehood of this assertion. (I'm not an expert, I just know by > researching). > > With pipelining, the CPU overlaps instruction fetching and decoding with > instruction execution, i.e., while one instruction is executing BIU is > fetching > and decoding the next instruction. So, assuming you're willing to add > hardware > you can execute more and more operations in parallel. > > So, in this way there is true parallelism in x86 arch. > > Just a clarification.
Holy shit! You are soooo off base here its not funny. 'More than one thing per clock cycle' -> What do clock cycles have to do with parallelism? Nothing. Concurrency means 'concurrent'. If two operations complete in one clock cycle *in series*, then its not parallel. Its fast, but not parallel. If you want an cpu architecture that performs *concurrent operations* in one cpu, look into EPIC or IA-64. Just a un-clarification. Rob -- GPG key available at: <http://www.robertcollins.net/keys.txt>.
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