"A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software"

[Donn Cave]

Quoth Skip Montanaro <skip at pobox.com>:
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|     Jp> How often do you run 4 processes that are all bottlenecked on CPU?
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| In scientific computing I suspect this happens rather frequently.

I think he was trying to say more or less the same thing - responding
to "(IBM mainframes) ... All those systems ran multiple programs ...
My current system has 42 processes running ...", his point was that
however many processes on your desktop, on the rare occasion that
your CPU is pegged, it will be 1 process.  The process structure of
a system workload doesn't make it naturally take advantage of SMP.
So "there will still need to be language innovations" etc. -- to
accommodate scientific computing or whatever.  Your 4 processes are
most likely not a natural architecture for the task at hand, but
rather a complication introduced specifically to exploit SMP.

Personally I wouldn't care to predict anything here.  For all I know,
someday we may decide that we need cooler and more efficient computers
more than we need faster ones.

	Donn Cave, donn at drizzle.com