Re: Dead Amiga? --- Live Apple

[nugundam+noube@best.com]

Rubywand <rubywand@swbell.net> spawned virtual particles writing:
>      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.

Pretty much what distributed.net deals with.  Right now, it's already
working on cracking RSA's 64-bit encryption.  Next projects are primes,
etc.

>      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

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