Re: Alpha vs. Twin Pentium

Alan Cox (iialan@iifeak.swan.ac.uk)
Fri, 8 Sep 1995 09:49:21 +0100 (BST)

> Also, for the SMP people, is there a SMP Pentium machine available that
> has more than 2 CPU's? And, how hardware dependent is the SMP stuff? How
> difficult would it be to do a SMP for Alpha?

There are now Compaq MP compliant 4 CPU systems. The SMP stuff is split into
two layers, a processor specific layer - that needs to shrink, and a generic
layer that needs to grow 8).

It makes some assumptions at the moment that I don't know will be true for
Alpha systems - notably that the caches are hardware coherent.

I would also be cautious about entrusting commercial work to Linux/SMP for
a while. Its certainly not yet at the point you could do so.

Alan