UNIX operating systems already have advanced beyond these limits.
Sun’s Solaris crossed this barrier 13 years ago, scaling to 64 cores. By 2004, it was scaling to 144 cores. Since 2008 it is was scaling to 256 cores 512 threads. Today IBM’s AIX is scaling to 256 cores and 1024 threads.
The memory management system for Solaris was changed to address very large memory with Solaris 8 in 2000. The multithreading model was changed to address large core counts with Solaris 9 in 2002.
AIX added some very strong reliability features needed for large core counts and large memory to AIX 5.3 in 2004. Sun added similar reliability features for large core counts and large memory to Solaris 10 in 2005.
What is really needed from this point forward are transactional memory management, preferably in hardware, faster cache coherency mechanisms, and perhaps a move from NUMA memory allocation to COMA memory systems.
A quick note- Sun, er.. I mean Oracle just introduced
a 16 core “T3 chip”- does 128 concurrent threads-
works great as a web server-has issues running high
transactional DataBases- Now try and deal with Larry
on lowering cost vs Intel Nehalem servers-