This morning at breakfast, I had a mental arc related to multitasking. I was shoveling food into my son's mouth with his little baby spoon and into mine with my man-sized tablespoon. Here's how I related it to multitasking:<\/p>\n
Using a different spoon (pipeline) for each application (mouth) requires a context switch (putting one spoon down and picking up another) in a non-ambidextrous (single processor) system (person). An ambidextrous (multi-processor) person would be able to operate both pipelines simultaneously, thus running everything faster.<\/p>\n
Another option for increasing speed is to use the same pipeline for both processes--ie. use the same spoon to feed both mouths. This works fine if the processes cooperate well enough--ie. clean the spoon off (clean the registers, or the input queue or whatever) sufficiently when they're done taking their turn with it.<\/p>\n
So what can we learn about computers from this example. Perhaps nothing. But we do learn something about what computer scientists think about at breakfast.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This morning at breakfast, I had a mental arc related to multitasking. I was shoveling food into my son's mouth with his little baby spoon and into mine with my man-sized tablespoon. Here's how I related it to multitasking: Using a different spoon (pipeline) for each application (mouth) requires a context switch (putting one spoon...
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