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On Feb 9, 10:13*am, "Arny Krueger" wrote:
wrote in message

...

I did not say multicore is a multiplication.

good.

In fact the bigger
limitation is that the various versions of windows do not context
switch very well.

Good insight.

By comparison unix makes much better use of
multiple processors.

I'll take that at face value.

*You are correct in that there is very little
individual software capable of of dividing computational tasks into
components that can be working on simultaniously. *At least not in the
typical user's world.

That't the rub.

*But these days even user machines freqeuntly
have background services that can benefit from a multiprocessor
environment.

IME, that is a second order effect.

*And single core microprocessors are only slightly faster
that dual and quad core any more.

Agreed, because increases in core speed without big bad thermal problems is
an unsolved problem.

Same thing happened with mainframes 2 decades ago, except the OS's werefar,
far *better multitaskers than Windows. I think that Windows multitasking
falls about in the I/O department. *It is OK when the I/O load is relatively
light, but put the pedal to the metal on the hard drive, and everything but
the primary task still seems to choke.

Yes, I would agree that a lot of i/o on a desktop by any single
process will bog it down. Our desktop doubles as a music server and
when I'm backing up a dvd from local hd to dvd-r the music server can
not keep up. That may factor into the unix comparison as well. Unix
tends to be on servers more commonly and servers tend to have more
sophisticated i/o systems that typical desktop computers. There are
certainly many factors beyond cpu that have an effect on computer
performance.