I see your point, and agree that it would be nice to have more apps making use of multi-threading, but I don’t think the situation is much better on other OSs. At least on haiku you know certain things (each window) will get their own thread without any programming effort.
But there is a point or use for multiple cores anyway, and it’s the same as for other OSs - supporting more cores/CPUs means you can run more software at once. You only need a web browser where each tab gets it’s own thread/process (ala chrome) for multicore to be useful, or the use case where you have a web browser, video player, office, pdf reader, game etc open at the same time and may want to do even more in the background. It would be nice if more software was written multi-threaded, but having several cores is useful even if it isn’t.
Also, I guess you were referring to other peoples “low efficiency exotic old” hardware, because my office workstation is brand new and very efficient (I guess Xeon on the desktop is maybe a little exotic). I just want to see if haiku works on it really… we’ve just got support for >8 cores, let’s test it on some bleeding edge hardware with 32 cores!
I meant others searching ebay for a bargain surplus multi-cpu motherboard.
And true the situation isn’t much better elsewhere when it comes to making use of an entire processor. But you would think Haiku software (not that is much out there) would start off from a better place else why write for it? Though as we both know it is easier said than done to write software that way.
Undervolting an FX8320 seems a worthwhile exercise as long as you don’t waste power savings on extra boards and other toys. That is the trouble though today. Back in the olden days we used to use computers for computing and were happy with a bit of colour. Now they are media consumption devices that are deemed deficient if they haven’t multiple-4k graphics board and 8 peta-byte SSDs in RAID 0…
I fear Haiku will always just be something to boot up in a VM every so often for a wistful look before going back to something more conventional.
I just got my i7-4770 machine 4 cores and 4 virtual cores.
Why? Because I want to write programs that just take too long on lessor machines, and then I hope to upgrade the CPU when Intel brings out it’s 8 core model this fall.
Still this is for personal use, not many people needed all that CPU power, but some do.
PS. I also expect this machine to be last me for five(5) years or more unless there is a major break-thru.
Another reason to search ebay for bargain quad core boards is some of them can run BeOS whereas the newer ones probably won’t. And do note that the ones that will run BeOS and Haiku are pretty specific I know there have been discussions on it in the past.
Well, my new Xeon machine wont boot haiku. I’m not sure why it didn’t like the CD, but not even the first icon lights up. Ah well, it works very happily on my laptop
@Munchausen Could you press spacebar just as the haiku bootloader starts (right after the BIOS/EFI ends it will get you into the bootloader menu) and set it so you have debuglog printing to the screen enabled and see where its failing specifically? I imagine the Haiku developers would be interested in any info you could provide.
Note there are 2 screen printing modes for the debuglog one where it prints a page and waits for input and another where it prints continuously both can be useful.
Me and my big mouth. I took out the 80GB SSD that had the latest nightly on it that booted on my new machine and transferred in a 2TB drive that had a earlier Haiku on it (about a month old).
It does not work!
Fails at the same point as the USB stick (the hard drive icon with a division exception), I will try to do more work to see where the break is, still try the latest nightly before giving up.
Have someone tried to boot Haiku on HP WX8600 workstation? Considering the price of used systems on eBay it seems to be perfect multi-core PC (2x4-core Intel Xeon with 16-32Gb of RAM) for using with Haiku
(I guess Xeon on the desktop is maybe a little exotic). I just want to see if haiku works on it really… we’ve just got support for >8 cores, let’s test it on some bleeding edge hardware with 32 cores! 
