Help me use my Dual Core CPU!

[Robin Becker]

Paul Rubin wrote:
> 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 ;).
> 

well these guys seem to think there are, perhaps it's a joke

http://anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2832&p=6

>> 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.


-- 
Robin Becker