This is what happens when I take my eye off the ball.

[andrewducker]

Julie recently bought a desktop - and got a quad core processor, which I thought sounded pretty high end.

Until I just went and took a look at processors, and realised that you pretty much can't buy single-core CPUs any more - dabs has three uni-core cpus, versus thirteen dual-core and twenty one with 3 or 4 cores.

Desktops still seem to be maxed out at four-core - but I do wonder how much longer that will last, and whether there's much point scaling beyond that for most people, without something that uses that much CPU, and isn't heavily hard drive dependent.

Comments

[andrewducker]

I remember reading about early versions of it - where for some reason it required the OS to know about it, which seemed remarkably odd to me. After all, if it's a cache built into the drive controller why would the OS need to know it was even there?

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

Ideally, you don't want the SSD to be a simple cache per se, as 1) it would get overwritten a lot, and 2) the SSD isn't necessarily faster than the HDD for continuous accesses.

The idea was that by surrendering control to the OS, they'd be able to make use of OS-level information like global power management: allow the OS to decide what stuff to put in SSD so that it can shut down the HDD and jsut run from the SSD. Good in theory, but in practice, it looks like none of the OS vendors ever bothered.

Theoretically, the drive could profile all this itself, but that would push up the complexity and the cost of the drive.