|
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 | # ]
|
|
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 | # ]
|
|
|
|
|