Comment Re:A better explanation (Score 2) 198
What I find interesting is that the current OS most people use, with the exception of
some RealTime and big iron custom dealies are still built in such a monolithic way that
it becomes more "profitable" to the user experience to still ramp up single cores as
opposed to having most cores running at the same speed.
With the exception of some high demand apps like games, extensive math apps,
and stuff that could or should be offloaded to GPUs desktop OS don't need a VERY
fast single core, they instead need lots of equal cores with fast context switch times
coming from the OS.
For example the fastest core in Win7/OSX for a desktop should be the one handling
the UI but it doesn't need to be THAT much faster than anything else. Instead all the
tiny little apps need to be sent around to as many different cores as possible when
they aren't multithreaded... unfortunately none of the current schedulers are that great
at this in consumer land. Even worse the kernels can have so much locked in that
you end up with lots of things stuck on a single core that could exist elsewhere.
Such a shame that true mach never got the switch times down because of the
huge separation in "drivers" or "kernel features". QNX definitely got this right,
but they never took multicores seriously, perhaps it is a much harder problem than
I am assuming.