Subtitles of the Movie

Believe it or not, it's not always better just to increase the speed of a Processor. That may seem contrary to what we've said before. But in specific instances, such as running multiple threaded applications, it's better to have two or more slower Processors than to have one incredibly fast Processor. The reason is that the Processors can help each other out. For example, if we are using Microsoft Back Office products such as SQL Server, this is a multithreaded application - it would be much faster to use two 400 MHz Processors than to use one 1 GHz or even more Processor. The reason is that the Processors will work together on the application. An analogy would be that say we are building a house, and we are going to put together the foundation, and there are three steps to putting it together - first we use the wood to put together the footers, than we are going to pour the gravel in, and finally we will pour the concrete in. As we are putting together the wood to create the footers, if no one is ordering the gravel than we will have to wait for the gravel once we finish the footers and get around to ordering the gravel. But if someone else will go ahead and order the gravel and have it waiting at exactly the time that we finish the footers, then we can complete the task much faster. By the same token while we are pouring the gravel, if someone will go ahead and order the concrete trucks in so that they are waiting to pour the concrete as soon as the gravel is in place, then we can complete the task much faster. This is what Symmetric Multiprocessing is all about, Symmetric Multiprocessing uses more than one Processor. And the Processors can be controlled and assigned to tasks. We can use Task Manager in some Operating Systems such as Windows to assign different Processors to different tasks. We can also assign multiple Processors to the same task, such as with the SQL example. Now Symmetric Multiprocessing is typically used in servers - it's not available on most workstation computers. Although it is sometimes available on high-powered workstations that work with perhaps AutoCAD and AutoCAM and other high graphic or highly-intensive applications. But more commonly, we would use Symmetric Multiprocessing on our Servers. And with the newest Operating Systems such as Windows 2000 DataCenter Server we can have up to 32 Processors Symmetrically Multiprocessing. So we can control 32 Processors as to what they are working on. This gives us a tremendous amount of capability for thinking and for work in our networks. Now, if we are going to have all of this thinking capability, then certainly we have got to have a way to get this information around to all of the components that are in the network. And the transfer of data as well as power goes through Buses. And we will discuss Buses in our next section.