Re: kernel 2.6.18+ SMP question

[Robert Cates <robert@kormar.de>]

michael wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-10-12 at 22:02 +0200, Robert Cates wrote:
>   
> > Hi all,
> >
> > just a general question - I'm interested in getting a motherboard that
> > supports 4 of the new AMD Quad Core CPUs.  That would be effectively 16
> > CPUs.  My question is, with the 2.6.18-5-686 kernel from etch, will the
> > SMP kernel work with all 16 cores?  What is actually the current limit of
> > cores (CPUs) that the 2.6.18 (or newer) kernel will support?
> >
> > Thanks much,
> > Robert
> >
> >
> >
> >     
>
> don't expect things to go 16x faster
>
>
>   
Ok, but 16x better?  Or 16x more efficient?  I know that if we're 
talking about a 2GHz quad core CPU we're not getting 8GHz of speed, but 
what exactly is the (performance) advantage of SMP?