Processors Toolkit

Story: Why you should care about quad-core processing

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Diminishing benefits

I was working on multi processor mainframes in the 80's and the problem was that the as you go from a single processor to two processors they (ie the operating systems) suddenly have to start thinking about each other in case they access the same store locations, the result was that a dual could deliver about 1.8 times a single if conditions were ideal. degradation increased further so that by the time you got to six processors you were getting less useful throughput than a single processor. What has changed?

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