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- Xref: sparky comp.arch:11865 comp.sys.intel:2812
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- From: shoens@rufus.almaden.ibm.com
- Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.sys.intel
- Subject: Re: Superscalar vs. multiple CPUs ?
- Message-ID: <2121@coyote.UUCP>
- Date: 22 Dec 92 17:41:13 GMT
- References: <1992Dec7.012026.11482@athena.mit.edu> <PCG.92Dec11162630@aberdb.aber.ac.uk> <1992Dec21.134531.3253@athena.mit.edu>
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- Organization: IBM Almaden Research Center
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-
- Jason Solinsky ...
-
- > In how many of these examples are we actually concerned with processor
- > performance? In editors and word processors we certainly aren't ...
- > In the case of a database, I would not expect it to be processor limited.
-
- As you have more cycles to fool with you get to put more function in,
- of course. So where I previously edited nroff source with ed, I now
- use a system like Framemaker with X-windows. Database systems are
- typically CPU bound because disks have been slow forever, so the problem
- of disk parallelism has already been tackled. Besides, if you analyze
- the popular transaction benchmarks you can see that the disk bandwidth
- required is relatively small, assuming reasonably-sized buffer pools.
- For complex queries, there's even more processing to do and more opportunity
- for smart data placement on disk and sequential prefetch.
- --
- Kurt Shoens
-