2006.09.22 14:20 "[Tiff] libjpeg", by Philip Watkinson

2006.09.23 00:51 "Re: [Tiff] libjpeg", by Graeme Gill

The next (latest?) big thing in CPU architectures is to provide hardware support for thread contexts so that if a thread would be delayed by a slow memory access, a different thread can be scheduled to run instantaneously.

Bob, in the popular arena, it's practically been and gone! :-) SMT (Simultaneous MultiThreading, or Hyper-Threading Technology, as Intel like to call it) is a Pentium 4 feature, and Pentium 4's are now being phased out in favour of the Core architecture (which is more of a reversion to the P6/PentiumPro/Pentium3 scheme of things). Currently no Core processor supports SMT (although I guess it may appear again at some stage, and/or other manufacturers may incorporate it), instead all the emphasis in the x86 world now seems to be on multi core processors, where each core only executes one thread.

Just to comment on thread safety, another tool available to solve some of these sorts of problems is thread local storage. MSWindows certainly has it, and so apparently does POSIX threads.

Graeme Gill.