I want to ask about two related topics in this thread. First, I heard that the processors companies have stopped trying to create faster CPU and instead they will be creating chips with several CPUs in them. Is that true? Relating to that, I heared that windows vista is going to use these new type of chips. Another intersesting thing about windows vista is that it is going to use 4 priorety levels instead of just 2. In IA32 hardware 4 prioreties levels have already existed, but windows decided not to use this for compatability with other cpus. So windows vista is not just an OS with better interface like, I think, some people have said here. Last, will there be a new linux kernel that will operate on the new chips and use the four priorities levels? or is there going to be a large gap between vista and linux capabilities? Thanks in advance.

Quote:Original post by Spoonbender
If it's worth having, Linux will have it. I don't know how Linux works with priority levels at the moment, but if someone thinks it'd be a good idea to extend it, then that's what they'll do.
As for supporting multicore chips, Linux has always done that. It's not a new "type of chips". They have existed for decades. Even P4's hyperthreading does something like it.

Worth does not necessarly means better.
The problem with the four priorities levels is that it is unique to intel's chipset. So if you want compatability to other OS, such as for cell phones or hand helds you will need to give up these priorities.
Vista may be less compatible to a large variety of cpus, but it would probabbly be faster then linux on the intel chipset.
That is what I think.

Quote:Original post by ZQJ
Besides, is nobody else on here predicting the death of the x86?

People have been predicting the death of x86 since the creation of x86. Give it a rest. 27 years (34 if you count from the original 4004) and it's still going strong (unfortunately?). I'd consider Itanium to be the single biggest failure to replace x86 with something better.

Anyway, the basic idea is that things have moved from instruction level parallelism (ILP) to thread level parallelism (TLP). Since about the original Pentium, the focus in x86 microprocessor design has been to take an incoming instruction stream in completely non-optimal order and re-optimize it on the fly, running as many things as possible in parallel and interleaving instructions as necessary to maximize efficiency. AMD and Intel have become exceedingly good at this, but the number of tricks they can pull at this level have been exhausted. That, along with the clock speed wall, have restricted single core performance for x86 considerably. Now, the idea is instead to maximize the throughput of multithreaded programs. Dual core is the first step in that direction.

Vista is still the NT kernel, and there haven't been any hugely fundamental changes. Vista will run on any machine that XP runs, although as with XP vs 2K, Vista is configured out of the box for a higher min spec. I don't know specifically about the use of extra protection levels on IA32, but it seems unlikely to me at this juncture. Maybe there's some big advantage to those levels I don't know about, but it seems quite late to do so. The NT kernel was written with portability in mind, more so than Linux ever was. I don't know how much their HAL can cope with differences in execution levels between processors, but it seems unnecessary to put in at this point.

Quote:Original post by bakery2k1
Of the architectures that Windows NT has supported in the past, plus those that it supports currently/will do in the near future (including AMD64), only the x86 supports 4 privilege levels instead of 2. Given that there is very little point to using the extra levels, it would constrain portability hugely to write an OS which relied on them.

That Vista uses them is probably about as realistic as the rumour that Vista dropped the entire NT core and is now is based on BSD.

Why wouldn't they drop the NT core?