HP Shows Off PA-8800 SMP-On-A-Chip CPU Plans

Eric^2 writes: "At last week's MicroProcessor Forum, HP's David J. C. Johnson unveiled the details of HP's latest RISC processor destined to redefine performance in Server-Class processors. Following a relatively simple strategy, the PA-8800 processor combines two PA-8700 cores on a single chip to enable symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) on a single processor. Aside from bumping the core speed up to an initial 1 GHz, enhancements include the addition of combined 35 MB L1+L2 cache. The article contains the full text. AMD, please steal an idea..."

Comments

An old idea....

[gatkinso]

Intel jammed two 486 cores on a chip and called it a "Pentium."

Gross simplification is a viable debating tactic, BTW.

Re:Practical Ideas

[psavo]

It doesn't seem too practical to me. Most apps don't benefit greatly from SMP anyway. Add to that the potential heat problems caused by two cores on one chip...Why not just go with a more traditional SMP approach? At least you won't have to worry too much about heat then.

Yo! Helloou? Where are you living man? In what decade? This is year 2001 and most of "cooperative multitasking" crap is buried in hell with windows 3.1 and alikes. Even MacOS is phasing out (though that one worked out pretty nicely [because of interface built that way])
You get tremendous boost when using SMP. There's no way to describe it, it's just awesome!

Remember, you run pretty many tasks continuously, and simultaneously! There's maybe apache, mozilla, bluefish, emacs & others running all the time! For chrissakes, why do you think distros make X 'nice -10'? Most of the applications are multithreaded by now, not doing it is just insane, simply because of different overheads & application responsiviness.

Just think for a moment before posting something like that..

1GHz, that is sooooo slow

[Red Moose]

1GHz? Man my Pentium 4 2GHz beats all these supposedly "fast" chips. It's HALF the speed, for christ's sake. That is sooooooooo quarter 3 2000.