On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 06:55:46PM +0200, Max Shinn wrote:
> Would someone be willing to explain this to a noob please?  If I
> understand correctly, it has two processors: a dual core ARM, and a 16
> core with some other architecture.  So /proc/cpuinfo shows 18 cpus,
> and hence 18 independent single-thread processes can each run on their
> own core?

Most likely since the two processors are independent and with
different architectures, /proc/cpuinfo will only report the two ARM
cores.

>            Their forums suggest they don't have OpenMP support yet
> too, but shouldn't OpenMP be able to support this kind of setup by
> default?  I'm just curious because I have developed a need for
> parallel computing with an OpenMP codebase.

OpenMP works on symmetric multi-processing systems.

I don't see any programming documentation for this but if it is like
other systems I've seen in the past, there will be some memory shared
across a bus between the two processors.  Some kind of supervisor will
run on the 16-core coprocessor, waiting for instructions from the main
application processor.  Think about two applications on a normal OS,
communicating via a shared memory segment - you can have data arrays,
locks, queues of processing instructions, etc.

Without a good library, there will be a lot of housekeeping to do to
keep the 16 cores busy.

Cheers,
florin

-- 
Sent from my last battery.
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