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Inventions inna-smartphone | 45 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Inventions inna-smartphone
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 04:21 AM EST
Having more than one processor is not a recent idea.

When I was working as the computer department for a mail-order retail company
back in 1992 the system was upgraded to have a second processor.

Have more than one processor is an idea that is more than possible to have, just
not physically possible until the technology caught up.

The first steam engines were atmospheric. Any attempt at high-pressure steam
generally resulted in the device blowing up due to the lack of strong metal.
Once the metal development had caught up, steam engines were able to to use high
pressure steam, instead of the atmosphere, to drive the piston.

Apple is saying that everyone would have used an atmospheric steam engine to
power a locomotive and no-one would have thought of using high-pressure steam
to drive a locomotive before they patented it, even though the reason was that
high-pressure steam was impractical due to explosions due to "weak"
metal.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Multi/Hyper threading and ARM
Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, February 20 2013 @ 11:26 AM EST

Supporting your view, programming for multiple threads, real and virtual/hyper cores, and processors is just implementation because only the operating system knows exactly what is the underlying architecture (and even that may be faked as in virtual machines). Thus, PHOSITA should have known about the issues involved because applications would not specifically know what type of processor without asking the operating system directly. Thus, PHOSITA should have at least wrote hopefully thread-safe code especially since phones need a real-time OS meaning that their code could be suspended at any time.

Multiple processing and multitheading are as old as the hills in computer science but getting adequate programming is a different story. Also hyper threading was the rage around at the time of the filing but starting to address the negative side (not present in modern cpus). So a simple search clearly shows that the ARM and hence cell phone industry was well aware of dual processing (which is different from having two unique cpus or cores). For example, in 2006 from the Inquirer ARM is no fan of HyperThreading. Searching on multithreading and ARM also clearly shows that the ARM architecture was able to perform multithreading in the 1990's. Perhaps earlier if you consider real-time operating systems.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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