The amount of computing power available to the end user of a workstation has increased dramatically with the advent of RISC technology. Still, demand for ever-increasing cpu power persists; existing operating systems and applications are making computers ever more attractive to ever more users.
Hardware technology provides approximately 100% increase in computing power every two years. To provide greater capacity in one unit, many manufacturers offer tightly-coupled multiprocessors, multiple processors accessing the same real main storage and i/o configuration.
There are limits to the advantages of these two approaches. At some point the current rate of hardware speed increase may lessen. Tightly-coupled multi-processor versions of modern, pipelined and cached processors are difficult to design and implement, and become more so as the number of processors increases. This causes product cycle time to lengthen, a severe handicap in today's fast-moving workstation marketplace. Furthermore, the requirement to support multi-processing often reduces the speed of an architecture's implementation over what would be attainable by a uni-processor. A multi-processing operating system, if not available, must be produced. If one is available, it is likely that there is an intrinsic performance penalty because of m-p capability,
as there is in hardware.
By: C. R. Attanasio, S. E. Smith
Published in: RC18442 in 1992
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