Dinosaur
02-09-2002, 11:12 PM
Excuse my ignorance of PC CPU functions at the nitty-gritty level and similar ignorance of the innards of OS operations on a PC.
On a Mainframe, the OS can run 5-10 or more programs on a time slice basis, and have say 5 disk I/O operations, 4 Tape operations, 3 printing jobs, and many keyboard input devices running concurrently. While two or more programs will not execute concurrently (unless there are multiple CPU’s), many I/O operations function concurrently with no requirement for CPU attention until there is an error interrupt or an I/O complete interrupt.
On a PC with three physical disk drives, can three disk data transfers take place concurrently? Can the CPU transfer data to printer memory and concurrently transfer data to/from a disk?
Is concurrent I/O & computing limited by the CPU & motherboard capabilities, or by OS capabilities? For example can Lunix or Unix run multiple devices, while Win9x cannot? Does NT or IBM OS/2 have more multiple I/O capability than Win 9x?
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Gouverneur, the Dinosaur from pre-compter era.
Eschew Obfuscation!
If one hundred million people believe a foolish idea, it is still a foolish idea.
On a Mainframe, the OS can run 5-10 or more programs on a time slice basis, and have say 5 disk I/O operations, 4 Tape operations, 3 printing jobs, and many keyboard input devices running concurrently. While two or more programs will not execute concurrently (unless there are multiple CPU’s), many I/O operations function concurrently with no requirement for CPU attention until there is an error interrupt or an I/O complete interrupt.
On a PC with three physical disk drives, can three disk data transfers take place concurrently? Can the CPU transfer data to printer memory and concurrently transfer data to/from a disk?
Is concurrent I/O & computing limited by the CPU & motherboard capabilities, or by OS capabilities? For example can Lunix or Unix run multiple devices, while Win9x cannot? Does NT or IBM OS/2 have more multiple I/O capability than Win 9x?
------------------
Gouverneur, the Dinosaur from pre-compter era.
Eschew Obfuscation!
If one hundred million people believe a foolish idea, it is still a foolish idea.