Second Hand Smoke - Multi-CPUs - Cheap Enough

Reading THG readers' mail and comments has its drawbacks, and its upside. In this case, I got to have a small online conversation, where I did most of the listening, with a certain 29-year-old programmer from Huntington Beach, California, Michael Gerard. Mr. Gerard has a background in game programming, and frankly, I can't tell you why his emails stood out more than anyone else, but I had received a significant amount of email from people interested in THG doing more work on multi-processor systems.

It also helps that Mr. Gerard was very blunt about his passion for low cost multi-CPU systems; an area he feels is being neglected in the press. Before I get into the discussion I'd like to lay out a primer of sorts on parallel computing, multi-processor computing, whatever you care to call it. And, let me narrow it down to a personal system as opposed to a server. Multi-processor servers are not news. Microsoft got into multi-processor support with Windows NT, and now, Windows 2000, obviously avoiding its consumer client operating systems like Windows 98. With Windows XP we kind of get into an area that I haven't researched enough to comment on, but I suppose one can assume that if an ubiquitous consumer PC had OS support for multiple processors then, it stands to reason, there may be an argument for applications and users to take advantage of the opportunities available to them.

So, let's get down to some base level definitions and understanding of parallelism.