Making dual cpus to act as one

[Lynx]

If you could "couple" the pipe lines of athlons together so they ran in parrallel perfectly you could actualy gain the full 100% increase in speed. You would need to couple everything in the cpus together so making one super cpu. This would require a bus connecting the two which has massive bandwith. Not only that but speed. To releave the presure you would need a chip to "manage" the info going to each of the cpus. That could even be anothere cpu. The problem have would be noise. What does everyone out there think about this?

[Jon]

I think I've called RMA departments enough lately.

I'd like to hear what you had to say to them if you try it though, haha.

If it works I want to buy stock in your company, though.

[SickBoy]

It's all in the software.... to make dual CPU's act as one you need a really good control algorithm in the OS. It's possible on current mobos but not probable. Thats why 2 500 MHz CPU's on a dual CPU mobo dont necessarily equal 1 GHz.

SickBoy

[youthemandan]

This sounds like what the apple g4's are doing. Am i right?

[ken257]

The G4 is not doing it the way you think. Mac OS9 is still the most popular and there only a handful of apps that support duals, each app has to be coded for it. For example Photoshop needs a special plugin to support duals.
Mac OSX is based on unix(free BSD) which does support duals but apps still need to be coded for that purpose. And Linux is the same way.

The best OS I have used for a dual cpu system is BeOS. Be was designed from the ground up to support multiple cpu's and Be's compiler supports multiple cpu's so that all apps compiled for Be do also. One neat feature of Be is you can bring up a utility that graphs the load on each cpu in your system. Along with this is a button that alows you to turn each cpu on and off on the fly, don't turn them all off heheh. Run any cpu intensive app like 3d graphics, games, seti and switch off a cpu and you will see the performance differance bigtime. I wish Linux, Microsft, and Apple would take a lesson from Be. It is a great OS and it is really a shame that it did not take off as it is quite possibly the best comsumer OS out there.

[Lynx]

My idea is to have a simple switching component which runns at twice the speed of each cpu. This is very possible. this switch would pass the commands to each cpu alternatly. Thus negating any requirements for software.

[Rob Cork]

I don't know anything really about how cpus work to be sure, but I suspect it's more complex than that. For instance, what if one cpu had data in its cache that the other cpu needed to access in order to complete an instruction it had just been issued with. You'd probably need some sort of 'intelligent switch' to decide which commands to pass to which cpu, essentially doing what SMP-supporting software does but in hardware, I guess.

[Lynx]

What I said in the first post was that you would share the caches. The cpus would not be normal cpus but ones with a few more pins for sharing the caches