Re: The future of multiprocessors (was: SMP in 2.4 (fwd))

[Michael Adler]

A number of our larger customers care about computation/cubic foot.  The 
density of processors is important to them.  SMP machines work well here.

A future Alpha processor will be an SMT (symmetric multi threaded) 
machine.  Above the lowest levels, it will look like a multi-CPU 
machine.  The machine will keep multiple thread contexts live within the 
CPU and will be capable of switching between these threads in a single 
cycle.  As it grows harder for compilers to find parallelism within a 
single thread we have had to look elsewhere to keep the machine busy.

-Michael


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