The problems with the problem

• Roughly 150M units of desktops and UP servers sold each year

• Roughly 1.5M MP servers sold each year

  • By far the vast majority of these are 4 CPU and less

  • Unix server sales: .8M/year, some MP and some not

• So what's the problem?

  • Have to multi thread to use more CPUs

  • Multi threading hurts small system performance and reliability

  • Small systems account for about 99% of the units

  • That doesn't count the embedded market where Linux is becoming a force

• Summary

  • The overwhelming majority of systems are single CPU

  • Multi threading is only needed for multiple CPU systems

  • Impact, if negative, should be weighted by market share

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Slide 4 of 35

11 Jul 2002 lm@bitmover.com