What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS 1980

Well, tend to, but are by no means guaranteed to ... I've used multiprocessing (as in, 2 to 8-way SMP RISC UNIX) systems that weren't at all "smooth". And that's with both single- and multi-threaded workflows.

And then there's the added fun of never knowing which part of a pipe (as in, foobar run from a shell) gets to start first...

Mind you, the throughput wasn't at all bad for the hardware, though.

Sure, on average they are smoother.

I do strongly suspect that the scheduler complexity was what caused the occasional delay.

Except that on some systems, moving a mouse pointer isn't a "minute" task anymore. Anything running X on a dumb framebuffer and graphics-acceleration API emulated in software... well.

Even so, having another CPU to choose from should help when trying to find something to run stuff on. buttuming the scheduler is up to it.

I think I saw some of such theory somewhere the other year... it does continue to amuse me to see how all kinds of people claim that a second processor doesn't help with games and such. I had a graphics card with supposedly multi-threaded drivers in Windows too, years ago already.

-- #Not speaking for my employer. No warranty. YMMV.