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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TigerPaw who wrote (177959)	5/13/2004 5:21:13 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

TP, Both Linux and Windows basicly share all the memory in the system among the processors. Even if a task is specified for a particular processor the access is checked for coherency. The L2 cache has no knowledge of what memory is assigned by the OS to what processors. If every local access to the L2 cache has to go out onto the bus for cache coherency purposes, then there is no need for the MESI cache protocol or for writeback caches in the first place. This question has been settled way back in the early-90s when WB caches were invented in the first place. Yes, I acknowledge that the likelihood of Linux or Windows assigning tasks intelligently to dual-core processors is low. But there will still be cases where tasks sharing memory end up on the same dual-core processor, if only by chance. Plus I have already mentioned the benefit of reducing the number of processors per bus, which allows Intel to increase the bus speed. That's a lot of low-hanging fruit that can be harvested by multi-core, more than that which can be harvested by AMD (because HyperTransport is less of a drag on scalability than Intel's shared bus). Tenchusatsu