SMP/dual (multi) core phase II

[markw at mohawksoft.com (markw at mohawksoft.com)]

SMP dual 2X (dual core) CPUs, i.e. 4 processing cores and two physical
processors.

I prefer dual SMP to dual core as the multi-core processors share
internals of the processor and are less capable than two independent
processors. That's at least as far as I've been able to gather from
research without actually devising and executing tests to prove this
conclusion in practice. Kind of like the difference between Siamese Twins
vs Identical Twins.

If someone has an educated argument against this position I would really
like to be educated.

Second, does anyone out there know if dual core processors can (as a
matter of hardware and OS implementation) be used to run two different
processes simultaneously rather than merely two different threads of a
single process. In true SMP, this is no problem, but with multi-cores,
things like the memory and I/O controllers are shared and does this
present a problem with things like memory addressing? i.e. does the same
VMM map have to be loaded into the memory controller, meaning that
separate processes with different virtual memory mapping could not benefit
from two cores.

Anyone have any real experience or info?

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