Help me use my Dual Core CPU!

[Paul Rubin]

Robin Becker <robin at reportlab.com> writes:
> No I think they tried to just run a lot of processes at once and they
> got the 8 core by just substituting the two dual cores with two quads.

Huh?!  There are no quad core x86 cpu's as far as I know ;).

> I used occam back in the eighties with ibm pcs and these 4 transputer
> plugin cards. One of my bosses was Scottish MP and heavily into macro
> economic modelling (also an inmos supporter). I seem to remember doing
> chaotic gauss-seidel with parallel equation block solving, completely
> pointless as the politicos just ignored any apparent results. Back of
> the envelope is good enough for war and peace it seems.

Heh :).  OK, yeah, I remember Occam now, it used CSP (communicating
sequential processes) for concurrency if I remember, sort of like
Erlang?

> Is suppose Alice isn't related to the "Alice Machine" which was a
> tagged pool processor of some kind. I recall it being delivered just
> when prolog and the like were going out of fashion and it never got
> faster than a z80 on a hot day.

No I don't think so.  It's Standard ML with some concurrency extensions
and a really nice toolkit: 

   http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/alice/ 

Actually I'm not sure now whether it supports real multiprocessor
concurrency.  It looks cool anyway.