BloJJ

This is Juan Julián Merelo Guervós English-language blog. He teaches computer science at the University of Granada, in southern Spain. Come back here to read about politics, technology, with a new twist

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Using a couple of processors (or more)

I obviously harbor a lot of respect for Donald Knuth, but what he says in this interview (via /.) is plain wrong:

The machine I use today has dual processors. I get to use them both only when I’m running two independent jobs at the same time; that’s nice, but it happens only a few minutes every week

Beeeeep! Wrong. If you have a dual or quad processor, the OS is delivering processes to them all the time. So you're using all of them all the time. Right now I'm listening to music, and using a browser, while I'm running X and various widgets. That's only on the surface, deep down, there are a few dozens process running. So you're running two independent jobs (and scads more) all the time, and you get to use both processors all the time. Not to full capacity, of course (right now, my own processor only takes a 20% load), but you get to use them all the same.
Etiquetas: knuth, latex, great minds, gurus also make mistakes