SMP On a Budget: Penguin Power

by William Henning
Editor, CPUReview
Copyright July 8, 1999
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Introduction

(Tux the penguin was designed by Larry Ewing)

As some of you may not be familiar with the acronym, I guess I should start this article with a brief explanation of what SMP stands for. SMP is an acronym for "Symmetric Multi-Processing", which is a method of building computers with more than one CPU (Central Processing Unit). Let me ask the obvious...

Question: why would you want to have more than one CPU in a computer?

Answer: to make your computer run faster!

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SMP is not new; it has been used in workstations, mini and mainframe computers as well as super computers. Recently, SMP systems have found an expanded market because of high performance PC-based servers. With recent price drops, and the availability of inexpensive SMP capable operating systems, SMP systems are starting to show up in the homes of technical enthusiasts...

Question: why not just have once CPU that runs faster?

Answer: technology limits to how fast a single CPU may run (in a given generation).

The first SMP system I used had two Pentium 133Mhz processors; at the time the fastest processor you could get was a Pentium 166. Most off-the-shelf software cannot take advantage of an SMP system; as a matter of fact you need an SMP capable operating system to make use of the second processor at all. Multi-threaded software can however take excellent advantage of an SMP system.

[Editor: SMP systems can actually be slower than single processor systems under some circumstances; see "When two Heads are NOT better than One"]

Later in this article I will continue discussing how SMP systems can be faster than uniprocessor systems.

NEXT: Building a Box

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