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To: Steve Porter who wrote (57456)	6/7/1998 11:06:00 PM
From: Dale J.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

<< For the average user (even a power user) MP is most likely a waste. >> Steve, I agree MP is overkill for an individual and it's true that there are CAD applications that may require a single chip like alpha instead of MP. So your point is well taken. But most of the server applications (ie NT Network servers, Mail Servers, Web Servers, Lotus Notes and MS Exchange Groupware servers, as well as all major database applications will benefit from SMP and I believe it will be the preferred choice). Before Intel bought corollary there was no standard. But now Windows NT Enterprise edition will support SMP and Intel's profusion technology will make it a standard. Unisys, IBM, NCR, HP, Cpq etc will all offer standard 8-way systems based on Intel's technology. Unisys is going a step further and promises 32 and 64-way SMP servers by year end. As an Intel investor Alpha really isn't much of a concern. AMD/Cyrix inflicted price erosion is Intel's biggest challenge and I hope Intel can deal with it like they have in the past. Dale

To: Steve Porter who wrote (57456)	6/7/1998 11:57:00 PM
From: dan pearson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Well, I for one, would love an operating system that could actually apportion different applications to an array of cpus. Or, even better, allow me to assign one cpu to act as a soft modem-video signal processor -etc, while another can perform application instructions. whaddayathink? ...dkp... geocities.com

To: Steve Porter who wrote (57456)	6/8/1998 11:29:00 AM
From: L. Adam Latham	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Steve: Re: Well it always floors me how people seem to think that by adding more CPU's Application "x" will get faster. ... For example if you have complex matrix operations to perform, the last thing you want to do is think about how to cut it up into multiple threads so that you can use the other processors. The many matrix operations that make up the Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) are probably some of the most studied and optimized routines in scientific computing. It would be difficult to find a hardware platform that doesn't have the BLAS library tuned for it. Intel has a BLAS library available for downloading at: developer.intel.com The most compute-intensive Level 3 BLAS (matrix-matrix operations) have been multithreaded by Intel for multi-CPU machines. My customers on-site use the library, and there was absolutely no recoding necessary - they simply linked in Intel's BLAS library instead of the one they were using. It's true that they didn't get a 2x improvement when utilizing both processors in their system (they got 1.7x - 1.8x improvement, I believe), but then again most developers realize that this is a theoretical limit that isn't achievable in real-world problems. Adam