Asymetrical Multi-Proc OS?

[all420]

Does anyone know of an OS out there that supports asymetrical multi-processors? To the best of my knowledge, Linux, Solaris, *BSD, etc. are only SMP.

[XWRed1]

What hardware are we talking about here? Just something like putting a P3-733 and a P3-933 together on an SMP board?

I've never seen any x86 hardware that was actually meant to be used in an AMP situation.

[all420]

I wasn't acutally planning anything specific, I just thought if there was a Unix based OS out there w/ AMP support it might be neat to play with it. Hoever, if I did do a system w/ AMP it would be an x86

[XWRed1]

I'm pretty sure the way it works, is that in x86, the OS just has to support the Intel MP specification, which seems to pretty much just outline SMP, and then its a crapshoot as to whether or not your hardware would place nice with the spec.

I know there are people who have run NT with mismatched processor speeds, and Linux too.

Performance will probably be worse than an SMP solution, however.

[David]

I could see an AMP system making sense, ie a Duron 600 to deal with IO, Memory lokup etc, and a Tbird or Xp to do the real number crunching.

[XWRed1]

Yea, well, there's no set up, for x86 at least, that works that way.

[PolyPill]

I've never even heard of AMP, are you sure it works? I'd like a little bit of info on this if you have any.

[all420]

ya, i'm sure it exists. I have looked at several references to it. This is a quote from a ZDnet article (http://www.zdnet.co.uk/pcmag/supp/server/multi.html).


"Multiprocessor computers come in two varieties; symmetric and asymmetric. Asymmetric multiprocessor computers use processors dedicated to a particular task, for instance graphics, or input and output (I/O). This is essentially what desktop PCs, with bus-mastering adapter cards have become, and it works well in situations where you need good performance for one particular task. But a fast graphics card doesn't help a database server. Symmetric multiprocessor machines have several identical processors, none of which are dedicated to any particular task. This way they can have a task given to them by the operating system and the whole system becomes more flexible."


There are many other references to it if you type in asymetrical multi processor in google. Basically, there is a powerful main processor that handles the normal stuff (RAM swapping, i/o access, kernel stuff). Then there is a less powerful secondary processor that is given a specific task like a computationaly intesnive rending thread.

[XWRed1]

Well, the AMP from that definition is so typical, that noone even really talks about that.

If you are asking about that, then yes, every operating system on the PC supports AMP.

However, most of the time when people talk about AMP, they seem to be talking pretty much about using mismatched processors in an SMP situation.

Yes, it does work, but its pretty much a crapshoot as to how good the reliability is and how much performance you get out of such a system.

[David]

Well, I have a GPU on my graphics card, and a little processor on my HDD etc