Editing Symmetric multiprocessing (section)

== Advantages/disadvantages ==

In current SMP systems, all of the processors are tightly coupled inside the same box with a bus or switch; on earlier SMP systems, a single CPU took an entire cabinet.  Some of the components that are shared are global memory, disks, and I/O devices.  Only one copy of an OS runs on all the processors, and the OS must be designed to take advantage of this architecture.  Some of the basic advantages involves cost-effective ways to increase throughput.  To solve different problems and tasks, SMP applies multiple processors to that one problem, known as [[parallel programming]].

However, there are a few limits on the scalability of SMP due to [[cache coherence]] and shared objects.