[plug] SMP vs memory, was: *athon

Mike Holland myk at golden.wattle.id.au
Thu Jul 22 10:53:37 WST 1999


On Thu, 22 Jul 1999, Trevor Phillips wrote:

> Two CPU's would mean VMWare could have a whole CPU to itself, and normal Linux
> apps can use the other (roughly speaking), as opposed to everything tussling
> for CPU time on one CPU...

But doesnt timesharing do a similar thing? If Vmware is hogging the CPU,
other processes will be given priority and run fairly normally.
  If the "whole PC" seems to slow down, it would be because of memory
swapping, not the CPU. So a second CPU wont help much, right?
 Just get more memory.
I expect you'll only really benefit from a 2nd CPU if 2 or more processes
are simultaneously hogging the CPU.
  (of course multi-threading is a separate issue)


Mike Holland <mike at golden.wattle.id.au>            Perth, Australia.
                          --==--
	"Disraeli was pretty close: actually, there are Lies, Damn lies,
	 Statistics, Benchmarks, and Delivery dates."



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