[geeks] distributedfolding

Dave McGuire mcguire at neurotica.com
Tue Jan 14 10:53:10 CST 2003


On Tuesday, January 14, 2003, at 11:38 AM, Bill Bradford wrote:
> OS X is UNIX, so pretty much *any* application is going to use both
> CPUs in *some* capacity.  Stuff for OS9 had to be specifically written
> to "see" the second CPU, but not stuff for OSX.

   This isn't entirely true...An application which makes use of threads 
will do this, but one that doesn't (and consists of a single process) 
cannot.

> If I run one process, it pegs both CPUs at about 50% load (varying), 
> but
> if I run two, it will peg both CPUs around 100% load.

   ...only for a threaded process.  Without threading, there's no way 
for the scheduler to hand out cycles to different parts of the program, 
because there *aren't* any different parts of the program.

       -Dave

--
Dave McGuire           "She's a cheek pincher.  I have scars."
St. Petersburg, FL                          -Gary Nichols


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