Re: Dead Amiga? --- Live Apple

[Rubywand <rubywand@swbell.net>]

Supertimer writes ...
> 
> Joseph Lee <nugundam+NOUBE@netcom.com> wrote:

 ....
 
> >: Actually, an engineer friend once suggested that a very powerful and
> >: cost effective computer could be built by taking a handfull of 8-bit
> >: 65C02 processors and running them in parallel.  Imagine a computer
> >
> >It's already done.  Few hundred thousand computers of any CPU and OS
> >running in a distributed manner hacking at a problem in parallel.
> >Look at www.distributed.net.
> 
> I'm talking about a computer and an OS designed as a personal
> computer...a very powerful one can be built with parallel processors
> even if each processor itself was only a fraction as powerful as the
> entire unit...

     Many computing tasks do not gain much from parallel processing.
Some, like verifying a mathematical proposition for a large range of
values, searching for primes, generating ephemeris tables, scanning a
graphic, etc. can gain a great deal. A catch is that the program must
know about and use the extra processing capability or there must be a
built-in 'expert system' which can figure out that the task can be
processed in parallel and arrange system resources to do it.

     One simple way to get a nice speed gain for a multi-tasking system
is to farm out background tasks to a couple extra processors, each of
which owns 4MB-8MB of local RAM. The foreground task, such as a game,
could run on a 'foreground cpu' with virtually no slowdown.

 
Rubywand