CompuServe Messages

Kelly, I like your slave processor idea. Let me suggest a twist I'd thought up. Make a card with a boxfull of 68000's or 68302's on it. Give each processor some memory and tweak the OS so that each slave thinks it's a full-blown amiga. System call can be handled a whole bunch of different ways: (1) insert dummy routines that transfer control momentarily to the master CPU for execution. (2) add contention-prevention hardware and hope that all system code is re-entrant. (3) swap code back and forth between the master and slave CPU on the fly, depending upon what the unit is doing. [big headaches with that one. Never mind.] The idea behind this is that the individual progs don't know that they're doing anything different and thus don't require recompilation to function. Ray-tracing won't go any faster, but it won't slow down the BBS that you're running in the backround. As the system gets more tasks, the OS just spreads them out amongst the processors. Since each processor still multi-tasks, it doesn't matter if you have more tasks that processors. ————————————————————TL———-