Quoth Skip Montanaro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: | | Jp> How often do you run 4 processes that are all bottlenecked on CPU? | | In scientific computing I suspect this happens rather frequently.
I think he was trying to say more or less the same thing - responding to "(IBM mainframes) ... All those systems ran multiple programs ... My current system has 42 processes running ...", his point was that however many processes on your desktop, on the rare occasion that your CPU is pegged, it will be 1 process. The process structure of a system workload doesn't make it naturally take advantage of SMP. So "there will still need to be language innovations" etc. -- to accommodate scientific computing or whatever. Your 4 processes are most likely not a natural architecture for the task at hand, but rather a complication introduced specifically to exploit SMP. Personally I wouldn't care to predict anything here. For all I know, someday we may decide that we need cooler and more efficient computers more than we need faster ones. Donn Cave, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list