Re: Darwin & SMT?
Re: Darwin & SMT?
- Subject: Re: Darwin & SMT?
- From: Jim Magee <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2002 13:41:43 -0400
On Tuesday, September 10, 2002, at 01:16 PM, Bernie Zenis wrote:
Is anyone here familiar with Simultaneous Multithreading
(http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/smt/)? Does anyone know if
Darwin would lend itself well to SMT? For example, if a SMT PowerPC
chip came out, would it be easy to port Darwin to it? I realize that
might depend on what kind of SMT architecture was implemented.
I have always felt that Darwin works best on an SMP machine. There are
enough system threads, and multi-threaded applications to want two CPUs
in many "peak" CPU utilization situations (my Mac OS X system typically
has ~200 threads). I think the real world anecdotal evidence bears
this out as well (most people with dual-ies are quite happy with the
responsiveness of their machines, even when compared to single
processor machines of quite higher clock rates).
All of this is one of the reasons Apple ships all their PowerMacs as
dual processor machines right now.
The CPI numbers under most of those situations indicate that an SMT
(others call it Hyper-threading) processor might do reasonably well
compared to an SMP machine. But as you say, it all depends on the
particular SMT design and other architectural factors on any given
processor.
--Jim
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