8 core Mac Pro: Squeak and Croquet

J J azreal1977 at hotmail.com
Sun Apr 29 09:52:48 UTC 2007


From: John M McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com>
>Reply-To: johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com,The general-purpose Squeak 
>developers list<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>To: The general-purpose Squeak developers 
>list<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>Subject: Re: 8 core Mac Pro: Squeak and Croquet
>Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2007 13:09:34 -0700
>
>So yes Squeak is running one thread for the Squeak VM, but many  threads 
>processing host operating system calls.

Ah, cool.  Thanks for the info.

>I'll note it was discussed on the VisualWorks mailing list that there  is a 
>large performance hit if you allow a process to switch from
>one CPU core to another, which Daniel notes below. Windows provides  an API 
>call that allows you to mark an application to be dedicated
>to a CPU core, but that led to more discussion about how this was not  a 
>good solution either. Really the Operating System Vendors need to
>be a bit better in their process switching algorithms and ensure a  
>restarted thread should restart on the same CPU core to  take  advantage of
>any existing cached bits.  This issue should not rely on special need  
>cases hacked by any old programmer.

My understanding was that, at least linux, associates a large penalty with 
swapping CPU's so that it generally wouldn't happen unless it would be worth 
the time hit.

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