Surprise! Windows Requires Multicore Rework!

Dave Probert, a kernel engineer for Redmond, has recently received publicity for his view that "The current approach to harnessing the power of multicore processors is complicated and not entirely successful, he argued. The key may not be in throwing more energy into refining techniques such as parallel programming, but rather rethinking the basic abstractions that make up the operating systems model." Really. That's surprising. How long have we had multicore machines? Oh, wait. We've had multiprocessing since the, um, 1990s, right? With Intel's Core i7 having a quad core processor with Hyperthreading on each core -- a total of 8 processing threads -- isn't it time that Haiku had its day? I highly doubt that any of the regular OSes can pull this one off. BeOS really was ahead of its time and only now are people really getting it. My favorite quote from the article: "Responsiveness really is king. This is what people want." Duh.

Comments

  1. earl colby pottingerMarch 28, 2010 at 11:54 AM

    Yet somehow he skips over the fact that when OSs like BeOS and Haiku support multi-core designs from day one so do many of their programs.

    Also some tasks will always just use a few threads to get the work done, and many of the tasks out there that need the really power of multi-processing are already been written to support such configurations.

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