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To: Dan3 who wrote (160029)	2/25/2002 10:23:48 AM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Dan - you're a little off on what the SMP kernel does in Windows2000 and XP (and previously in NT). ALL of the kernels support multithreading and spinlocks. The difference is whether those threads will be dispatched to a single processor or to more than one processor. Also, the SMP kernel is only slower if you run it on a single processor machine since in that case you are doing a layer of dispatch checking which will never find an additional processor. In a 2 processor machine, the OS dispatches basic OS tasks across the multiple processors based on loading, so even if you are running applications which do not support multithreading, you will get benefit, since the OS tasks and application tasks will run on different processors. More typically, much of the I/O load will go to one processor, while memory management and background OS processing goes to another. New tasks (as well as new threads in an existing task) are divided based on load. You can easily see this using the performance monitoring tool. Processor utilization in a 2P machine is rarely different between the 2 processors by more than a few percent, and utilization of processors by task is pretty evenly divided to make that happen. The OS runs between 30 and 50 processes just getting up to the login prompt, and every other function - a browser window, a help screen, or whatever - runs additional processes. The responsiveness of multiprocessor systems is much better than single processor systems of equivalent horsepower IMO - it is much less likely that a process thread which hogs CPU time will cause a degradation in user response than in a single processor system. I would rather have a machine running 2 1GHz processors than a single machine with a 1.8GHz processor, for example. There are a few specialty applications which don't fit this profile - some games, and some rendering and modeling programs - but those are usually when the machine is only doing that one single job.