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What Happened To SMP For AMD processors?
Christopher Cashell asks: "Does anyone know what is going on with AMD and support for multiple processors (SMP)? I love AMD CPU's, but I've also come to love dual processor machines. Ever since the Athlon was still an 'in progress' chip code named the K7, and AMD stated that the CPU would support SMP, I've been drooling over the idea. Now, especially, I would love to have a dual CPU Duron box. Has anyone heard anything? I couldn't find anything on AMD's site about it. As I understand it, the CPU supports SMP, so it's just a chipset issue, right? Is AMD working on a SMP chipset? And if not, are any of the other big mobo/chipset manufacturers considering it?"
The VP6 is a nice board, however it will not rival the sucess of the BP6 simply because the new FC-PGA Celerons (Celeron II) does not support SMP anymore.
It's nice as a dual P3 board, but it doesn't have the same price/performance appeal as the BP6 did with its Celerons.
Any limitations on the number of CPUs is going to be in the chipset either in the number of pins (about 100/cpu) it can support, or in internal queuing stuff in the chipset keeping track of outstanding cache probes - the bus protocol itself is refreshingly free of such stuff.
The pin limitation is the main one - 14 CPUS means 1400 pins on the bridge chip - luckily the datapath can be bitsliced - by 16-bits can be done trivially due to the clocking scheme but the master chip's still going to need to be able to look at ~32 pins/cpu - so 14 cpus is still in the 500 pin realm - not a cheap solution - don't expect it for comodity K7s any time soon
Since the SMP market is relatively small (compared with the 1 CPU market) they're not going to sell a lot of these chips with the extra 100 pins - and you will pay a premium because the volumes are small.
I think you meant "500 MHz PowerPC G3 is approximately twice as fast as a 500 MHz Intel PII/P!!!" or "500 MHz PowerPC G3 is approximately as fast as a 1 GHz Intel PII/P!!!"
It's the 760 and 770 Chipset (North Bridge) that support SMP and whcih are currently in development.
The 751 was simply the south bridge to the 750 chipset, both were released over a year ago and are quite outdated now.
The 751 South-Bridge (like any other south bridge) simply runs functions like the PCI bus, IDE bus, USB, serial ports and has nothing to do with the main CPU bus, Memory Bus, or AGP bus.
The mainchipset is refered to the "North Bridge", this is the important one.
Not really, because AMD doesn't use the P6/GTL bus architecture like Intel does. AMD licensed the EV6 bus off DEC, this is actually superior to Intel's current offerings, it supports upto 32 processors each with their own dedicated bandwidth.
Intel's SMP chipsets share the processor bus between them, this is why a quad Xeon isn't a powerful as you might think, because the bus can become saturated very easily which leads to starving the processor of data very easily.
Go here in order to see the table that points out when (not exact dates) the SMP support chipsets will come out. The bottom line is that sometime in Q4 2000 VIA and AMD will have one.
While Intel has fucked up, and fucked up big, that still doesn't mean that AMD is yet doing the job they should. Hopefully with the 760, they will. Plus Intel has a bonus, they have laurels to rest on. Even though the 820 and 840 are buggy peices of crap, you can still buy 440BX, GX and ZXs. Those give you ROCK solid single and dual processor performance. So even though Intel has putchered some of their latest products, they still have older ones that AMD has yet to match.
AMD is clearly trying to overtake Intel's lead in the field of "failing to deliver".
It seems to me that buying several different speeds will be the norm as multiprocessor machines move into the mainstream. Think about it--you buy a motherboard that can take 8 processors, but you only have enough cash for 2. So you go ahead and buy the 2, confident that in 6 months you'll be able to buy 2 more for the same price, but at a much higher processor speed, and just toss them into the machine.
Incremental upgrades are a compelling benefit from the consumer's perspective, and shouldn't be dismissed.
daniel
All I needed to know in life I learned from
You can disable the sound if it's not up to your standards. The drivers for what OS? Linux? I love linux but I haven't seen much in the way of great driver support for AGP, USB, and FireWire on any harware platform.
_damnit_
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
umm.. a beowulf cluster doesn't even reasonably compare to a dual-processor machine. Apples and oranges, man.
I don't want to custom-author every piece of software I run. I just want more than one CPUs.
And I should point out that the Athlons are supposed to support SMP, and apparently chipsets will be available early next year to take advantage of that. So it seems your argument that fast and cheap preclude SMP doesn't quite hold water.
Not necessarily -- various peripherals are
likely to be at different memory addresses
on Alpha motherboards, with possibly some
word-size/ordering assumptions that would break
with a different ISA like x86. WRT Alphas
supporting x86 code, that's only in a limited
part of the various BIOS's that you can choose
between, not inherent to the processor or
anything else. Additionally, some peripherals
*are* alpha-native. I'd probably guess
that none of the Alpha SMP motherboards would
do the job.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Well, that's very interesting. Except that most of the information I've found today says that the 760MP chipset is due out in Q4 of 2000, with motherboards arriving around the same time, or very shortly thereafter.
Once again I have to thank you for going that extra mile towards making Slashdot a better place. Your 'help' towards answering a simple question is greatly appreciated.
--
Toph
Topher
Thanks for the URL. Most of the sites I've checked for info are more general hardware and tech sites, I don't have URLs for very many AMD specific ones.
--
Toph
Topher
Fact:
OpenPIC has been supported by linux for quite a while now as it is the SMP scheme used on SMP PowerPC boards. Do a search in linux/arch/ppc for openpic.
-----------------------------------------------
Opinion/AFAIK:
in theory any CPU can be used in an SMP configuration. The reason intel's newer Celeron's don't is that Intel's APIC scheme has moved a lot of the PIC logic onto the CPU core - IRQ control logic is split between an IO-APIC on the motherboard and a PIC on the CPU core (connected by a special PIC bus. Traditionally the PIC is external to the core.
intel just disable the more advanced SMP PIC logic on Celerons. It's still there, it just can't talk to other CPU's. Still, in theory, even these crippled CPU's could still run in SMP with a special motherboard that implemented a totally external PIC. (just wouldn't be Intel's SMP scheme).
AFAIK OpenPIC is totally external to the CPU, so it does not need explicit CPU support. So the K6 *could* have been run in SMP config *if* someone had made a K6 OpenPIC board.
(PIC == programmable interrupt controller)
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Well, I have a 700 and 900MHZ box. Would be a great deal if I could get board that could utilize both these babies, in about a year or so :)
Yes, I WILL buy a board that supports this, that is if I can run Linux on it!
-adnans
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
According to my roommate who interned at AMD over the summer, the Athlon has always been SMP capable, but a motherboard that took advantage of this has not yet come out.
There was a Tyan board that was supposed to come out a long time back but never materialized. The KX133\KT133 chipsets are not capable of SMP, but supposedly VIA will be coming out with a board that can do it.
What you really want to watch out for, however, is the new AMD 760MP motherboard chipset. It's the high performance multiprocessor version of the upcoming 760 chipset.
Mine also had the SCSI "controler", it was really a byte-banged SCSI, no smarts on the card. At least I think that is how it worked, but it had a real SCSI connector. I don't think I ever used the SCSI at all. At one point I had thought of using it to test "IP over SCSI", but then someone published a 1Apr RFC about it, and I lost intrest in pionering the hack :-)
FreeBSD did recognise the SCSI "controler" (well, prior to 4.0 it did). Hmmmm, I should have uncrated my old Atari ST drive (it is a 20M SCSI drive with a SCSI to ATSI converter) before it was de-supported... ah well, there is still the 1G drive on my Sun 4/110....
Celerons DO support smp, it's just that Intel had disabled the feature with some jiggery-foolery. A hack to re-enable it started the move to SMP celerons.
To where now slotket adapters now include circuitry to do the workaround for you.
The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean you're an artist.
What part of "760MP will be released in Q1 2001" do you not understand?
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Man, that's the whole point of SMP. It would have been pretty useless otherwise. (see also: scalability)
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
This doesn't make any sence. The only reason I can see for buying from Dell is precisely the warranty. They have nothing else to offer besides that. If your Dells come with no warranty, you're much better off buying clones from your local hardware store. Then you actually do get warranty (not next-business-day like Dell, but it covers parts & labor which all I need), and save a lot of money as well. Oh, and you can configure your machines exactly the way you like, which is something I value a lot more than the label.
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Totally agree. I have used Dells personally (the guy who buys computers at my company buys from Dell exclusively). I was amazed when I opened the case of one machine and looked inside. The components they use are the really cheap kind. They even cut down on CPU cooling: instead of using a dedicated CPU fan they just put a really oversized heat sink on it! Basically, there is no way I would have put this crap in a machine I was building for myself. You can't beat Dell's warranty and name recognition though (but that's mostly a PHB thing).
___
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
I've got a Gigabyte GA-71X
1 AGP
5 PCI
2 ISA
damn straight.
(what to do when I next upgrade? I don't wanna buy a new pci parport card or scsi-1 controller... but most new boards dont even have 1 ISA)
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Thats not true at all.
:)
Look at Abit with the BP6, its the most popular motherboard they ever sold! there are entire websites dedicated to it. And dude to that, they have recently released the VP6, which looks to be another sweet dual cpu board. And with the specs that bad boy has... i don't think they will have ANY problems selling it
Its spelt "L-I-N-U-X", but pronunced as "Free Beer"
On whose authority? Just because Job's said so? To be fair, the benchmarks jobs was running were crooked Photoshop benchmarks that were solely optimised for the Mac, if he run a standard benchmark then I'd be interested in the performance.
Of course, for many of the Mac power users, Photoshop is *the* application where they need as much performance as they can get. Plus, it really wasn't that crooked, since they ran a "real world" application with a "real world" use of that application. It wasn't a synthetic benchmark, but doing something graphic artists need to do on a daily basis. Now, extrapolating that result to general performance is the problem. But since most of Apple's pro market does graphics of that kind, this is relevant benchmark.
Also, during Job's presentation when he introduced the G4 SMP, he just said "we're going to compare it to a 1ghz P3", great but I'd like to know more details than just "a 1giz P3", which chipset? how much memory? the graphics card? the hard disk type etc? You get the picture; it was hardly a objective test.
It was an off the shelf machine... not a custom built machine. So you can get specs from the OEM. Plus they did state they had outfitted them as close as possible to identical specs.
Also, you have to remember you could buy 3 or 4 Athlons for the price of a G4.
Are you talking CPU's or machines? G4 chips are cheaper than Athlons (in quantity), but Apple does have one of the highest margins in the PC biz. However, 3-4 vs. 1? I think not.
The big difference is that you can go cheap on PC components... decide instead of buying a rock solid Socket A motherboard like the Asus A7V, go buy a Biostar or something like that for 30-40% less. Same goes for components like RAM, hard drives, etc. While Apple may not use the *best* components, they use some very good components (like the latest IBM 7200rpm ATA drives). We could build almost identical (by spec) 1ghz Athlon T-bird boxes, but yet be several hundred dollars or more apart in price just by changing the quality level of some of the components.
BTW, the cheapest dual 500Mhz G4 box you can get from Apple goes for $2449 through Build To Order. At that price, you still get two IEEE 1394 ports, gigabit ethernet, DVD-ROM, and of course, the ability to run Mac OS X (definitely worth the price premium).
Codenamed Dolphin the dual Athlon is based on the AMD 770 chipset. Should be available 4th qtr this year.
-- Ted tsikora@powerusersbbs.com
Time will tell... check out http://www.slota.com
under motherboards.
-- Ted tsikora@powerusersbbs.com
You're in the same boat I am. I've pretty much personally resigned to waiting until about mid-March next year, just based on gut feel.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
All I want is to say I have a ``Duron-Duron'' setup...
And I ran, ran so far away...
And if I rack up enough puns here, I may not need to go to Kuro5hin today.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
www.linux-ide.org
So would a dual-Duron system be called a "Duron Duron?" Just a thought.
>different SMP drivers for the SMP Athlon boards
>to replace the APIC code.
Considering that Linux already supports SMP Alphas (up to 32-way has already been tested under 2.4-pre with no scalability problems), if Athlon uses the same technique I doubt there would be much new code required to get Linux to use it. :)
Rob
I was running good ole WinNT 4.0 Workstation most of the time before I upgraded to Win2k Pro. I used to dual-boot to Linux as well though, both on the 2.2 kernels and 2.3 development side. I haven't had any problems or weirdness which I can say were caused by the different processor speeds.
BryI can make the comment that this is currently possible with Intel chips. I've got a ASUS P2B-DS with a Celeron 300A (OCed to 450) and a PII-350 (OCed to 400) running on it at the same time. I don't know how the OS deals with it, I don't think the scheduler gives any more tasks to the faster CPU. I have noticed that the distributed.net client has one thread that runs about 10% faster than the other.
I was suprised as hell when I put these processors in and the machine actually booted, and reported that the CPUs were running at different speeds.
Bry
Comment removed based on user account deletion
AFAIK Alphas haven't used any sort of an L3 since 21164 (ev56's). ev6 and ev7 have only L1 and L2 - just like Pentium2/3 etc. The Linux boot message on our es40's (4-proc Alpha) using Tsunami/Clipper chipsets mentions nothing of L3.
And at that time multiprocessor systems were already being sold by other vendors.
The patents Intel owns are about the specific way they implemented multiprocessor systems. I don't know exactly what is patented, it might be that it is only the GTL+ bus used for P6 (PPro, PII, PIII, and Celeron) systems.
Intel's current MP offerings use a bus shared by all the processors and the memory controller (North Bridge). The Athlon and derivates will have one bus between every processor and the north bridge, or north bridges.
Intel's approach works well for a slall number of processors, and is quite cheap for such systems. AMD's approach (no, they did not invent it) is better for systems with many processors.
You could build an Intel system using AMD's approach, maybe that is how the eight way Xeon systems work.
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?
--- Jubal Harshaw
I'd imagine that the tougher problem would be hardware, but with processors all running much faster than the system bus, that probally isn't as bad as it seems.
As far as OS management, unless a process is hitting 100% (of the slower processor, that is), there is no real reason to push a process over to the faster processor. I'd imagine that the OS could look at the CPU usage for a process, and if it's consistently on the heavy side for some amount of time, force it to run on the faster CPU.
But the real benefit of SMP isn't going to be for those processes that reach 100%... it's going to be for things like Apache where you have many small processes/threads all running. Each processes may only take 1% or so, but when you have a couple of hundred of them :) The people running machines that consistently eat 100% of the CPU have the money to buy high end CPUs and boards to go with them.
My real question is will the added complexity of the chipset justify the added price, when chip prices are pretty low anyway? I mean, why spend extra money on the chipset to support both a 700MHz and 900MHz CPU instead of going with the cheaper chipset and dual 900Mhz's instead?
dennis
A friend of mine who seems intelligent told me:
The reason that there are no multi-AMD-CPU machines is because their inter-processor communication is fully point to point, which would offer huge performance benefits. Unfortunately, it requires many more leads than other CPUs, and motherboard manufacturers would need several extra layers. This is why there's been no chipset produced yet.
Tell me if I'm talking out of my ass...
--
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
After a little bit of digging around, I found that VIA is planning to introduce a Socket A chipset which includes SMP support (but only two-way). This chipset will be called the Apollo Pro KX266, and their roadmap has a little schpeil about it. That takes care of the processor (AMD) the chipset (VIA) and I really hope that somebody makes a motherboard to work with this chipset. Also, VIA says that the motherboards which will be based on this should support FireWire - sweet! I'm betting on Asus, Biostar, or Abit to come out with a mobo for the KX266, they currently make mobos for VIA's KX133. I expect to see this!
-Leo
> (It'll be a cold day in hell before Dell offers an AMD enterprise server. I give them 6 months to a year. ;)
It's supposed to get down into the 30's (Farenheit) in Austin tonight. Maybe that will be enough to get them started on it.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
AMD is scheduled to release its 760 chipset sometime in December or January. This chipset will support SocketA. EXISTING durons and t-birds will run on it. The great thing is... the chipset will FINALLY support SMP. WOOHOO!
"It compiles, SHIP IT!" -Overheard at Microsoft's development lab
You have given your self away I'm afraid with that "Steve Jobs incredible vision" bit.
G4's are only good for running Linux. Period.
Fawking Trolls!
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
>I believe that Intel "owns" SMP in some >intellectual property legal sense. Have they >erected any obstacles to AMDs chips being more >compatible with Intel SMP?
:) )
Incorrect. FAR incorrect. if intel owned SMP, why would sun and sgi and dec(aka compaq) (etc etc etc) be making 16, 32, 64 and higher-way SMP compatible stuff?
SMP was invented before intel even made CPUs (NOTE: i don't know this for sure......
It was one of the first things people wanted when they started making chips....let's throw more CPUs at all our problems. Unfortunately things weren't very scaleable back in the 70s...hehe
14 was the limit in the previous range of DEC AlphaServer machines (8400 series) due to design constraints (max 7 CPU boards, 2 per board).
They now do up to 32 CPU's in full SMP (there was an article on here last week about booting Linux on a 31 CPU Alpha system
I can't comment on Dell's service to individuals, I have always been a corporate customer. My home machine is a white box from a Linux boxbuilder, what can I say :-)
:-)
Dell quality - you are talking out of your hat. I have had exactly three hardware problems in several hundred machines at my last 3 companies; one fuzzy focus monitor, one power supply, one HD with stiction. All replaced immediately without quibble, based on a single phone call.
In terms of hardware support, yes they did have an annoying habit in the past of switching chipset suppliers, but that has settled a lot. Bottom line, you can shove in a Red Hat (or even FreeBSD) CD and it installs and supports all the hardware out of the box. Other parts of very acceptable quality - drives, memory, even CPU's
Cases - Dell cases and motherboards are proprietary, but are designed for ease of service, not thumb-busting. You can open a Dell and get to all the parts in seconds. Card cage some out with a single pull in most of their boxes.
The mini-desktops with the laptop style CD-ROM drives make great tradeshow demo servers - we run them with 0.5Gb RAM, Linux and two network cards.
No comparison to a whitebox; it took me 10 mins just to shoehorn a second hard disk into my mini-tower AOpen case at home.
Support - this is where Dell really scores. I have had both new (with the full 3 year warranty) and used Dells (90 days parts only). I have only had first class service, and I have never had a Dell tech (Galway or Round Rock) question my judgement.
YMMV, but I really do think you're spouting hackneyed Slashdot wisdom rather than personal experience.
You just don't get it, do you?
Who the hell moderated this up? Someone with no clue, for sure.
The Cray T3x (the large Alpha system) is not SMP, it's distributed MPP, a true parallel computer. The SGI Origin and IBM SP/2 are NUMA.
Intel's SMP bus sucks, to be sure, but no-one does SMP beyond 32 CPU's - for good reasons few modern Slashdot readers understand.
And this used to be a techie website. Sigh.
BeOS uses some insane level of threading (every app that draws a window has *at least* two threads). As far as I know, it checks the load on a given processor when it decides which one to stick a thread on. It's a given fact that with existing SMP boards that it supports, it is the most efficient OS on the market (it uses close to 95% of both processors IIRC, because everything has threads and the kernel moves threads onto different processors rigorously). Therefore, I would expect BeOS to perform best under that setup, followed by Linux (I think 85%, but I'm probably making it up).
Of all the OS's you could install, NT does worst, as apps have to be coded to reach out to the second processor and put a thread there.
Daniel
SSE was Intel's hacktogether response to 3DNow.
It's a clone in the same respect that AMD's CPU's are clones of Intels, or HP's pc's are clones of IBM's.
3dnow was basically AMD's way of getting around the slow stack-based FPU problem they were having.
I know that. Sheesh...the subtle points of word association analogies are lost on so many people...
I can say SSE is a hacktogether response, because one month after 3dnow came out the SSE instructions suddently because a feature on the PIII.
If it wasn't a hacktogether response there wouldn't have been an SSE2 so soon afterwards.
I actually do suspect they were working on something like it, however I think it was meant to be put into the P4 or later generation of processor.
128bit multiplies vs 64bit multiplies don't mean jack unless you want a 128bit result. Currently, the theoretical speed of both "instruction sets" is identical. 4 64bit registers vs 2 128bit registers..."When fully implemented" also supports the "shit, we gotta put this stuff in the PIII now!" response.
I don't see the developer support for it. Frankly I don't care. Anything that really matters has support for both instruction sets.
--- Bigger bits, softer blocks, tighter ASCII.
I haven't had this experience. Dell cases are usually very easy to get into (well, the old ones were; the new ones are too, once you figure out how to get the first one open ;-) and their support is top-notch. I've heard some stories to the contrary, but the number we received after complaining to one of their management types (this was before my time) was guarenteed to be answered within two minutes, and it always has.
:).
They even tried their hardest to support Linux on an old 6200, way before any official word from Dell.
You are right, though, you have to convince their support staff that the [insert hardware here] is broken before they'll do anything about it, but once you do you'll either have a tech there the next business day, or the part in 2-3 days.
Overall, their product is decent, and their support is excellent. Not to say that we buy Dells anymore, I made sure we put an end to that (beige boxes all the way
--- Bigger bits, softer blocks, tighter ASCII.
I think the reason people get the impression that AMD chips are not top of the line, is because of the poor compatability with other components.
;)
Exactly. While your issues may have been different, most of the major incompatability issues with the first Athlon chipsets involved AGP issues with various nvidia GeForce variants which were apparently drawing too much power or operating in some other non-standard-but-works-on-Intel way. Of course, the only reason these cards still worked-on-Intel is because nvidia and the card manufacturers worked hard to make sure their cards work with Intel hardware, and don't care nearly as much about compatability with the smaller AMD share of the market. Same as why more stuff is optimized for SSE than 3DNow even the 3DNow has been around for much longer. These issues are starting to go away now, as AMD gains strength, market-share and reputation in the consumer market; any issues would likewise go away quickly in the business market, given the chance.
Of course, it's worth noting that the components that gave AMD the most trouble, namely GeForce cards, don't belong anywhere near an enterprise server. Still, AMD needs to be very much more careful about such issues when launching into the business market than they were when launching into the consumer market. That's why they're taking their time introducing the 760MP and Mustang. Of course, your suggestion--having Compaq, IBM, etc. servers guaranteed to only contain validated configurations--will go a long way as well. (It'll be a cold day in hell before Dell offers an AMD enterprise server. I give them 6 months to a year.
Basically, in Intel nomenclature, CPUs are grouped into 4-CPU prossor groups, which use a shared bus, and the majority of the bus arbitration is done by the CPUs themselves, which is a big cost saver on motherboard design.
To go above 4 CPUs, you have a couple of options. You can "fake it" which how the ALR 6 CPU ppro motherboard you can buy on eBay work -- Put 2 groups of three CPUs on a shared bus, and with a relatively simple, but very clever hack, you can make the fourth CPU in each group a "phantom" that represents the other CPU group.
If you want to go beyond that you need to handle arbitration between the processor groups on the motherboard. This could be done either shared data bus or with a switched interconnect, with a price/performance tradeoff. I don't know how current systems work, but I imagine it is difficult to get a CPU designed for shared-bus MP to handle locked bus cycles and cache coherency when they aren't on a shared bus.
>Yes. They invented multi-processing.
I thought Al Gore did...
*shudder*
DEC sold multiprocessor machines (e.g. the PDP11/50, made 1972). loooong before Intel made CPUs with a usable memory model (e.g. something beyond that crappy 80286).
I tried to be funny.
I failed. Sorry!
They said you'd have to wait for the 760 chipset in the beginning of the whole Athlon thing. Maybe you should do some research before "asking slashdot" Sop
...guess I can ditch the idea of having w2k as game platform then... win98se runs solid on the same hardware though...
;)))))
haven't installed linux yet, i got the computer this friday
Ring brother, ring for me | Ring the bells of hope and faith
Ring for my damnation | I am at the gallows end
This goes against everything I have ever learned about computer hardware. I'm not going to say that it's wrong (I suppose it is possible), but I'd research this very carefully before buying any new hardware.
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>OS X doesn't offer a command line unless you buy server or developer versions for a lot more money.
That's not true. The terminal.app is in the OS X beta with csh, tcsh, and zsh. Bash origionaly compiled for Rhapsody is a free download from who ever has a copy. Or grab Darwin and compile your own shell of choice.
There is LinuxPPC support for G4 SMP machines.
Yes, the OS X GUI windowing engine currently has performance problems compared to the X Window system. But then, Apple is trying to do more with the vector graphics of PDF.
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blinko - "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down"
Too bad BeOS didn't become more popular, with its multi-processing support for consumer/client machines. That must have been a major reason that Intel sunk money into Be, since the os encouraged dual Celeron or Pentium II mobo sales to those who tried the OS.
I hope those ties don't inhibit full Beos support for dual Duron systems.
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blinko - "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down"
Here are the links working this time :-/
HotRail
and
Article
Stop over-analyzing your analizations
Also, please note that it is before 10:00 AM on a Sunday and they called me at 11:00 PM last night and asked if I could come in to work today, so I am swearing a whole fuckload more than I normally would. goddamn bitches and ho's
Free music from Jack Merlot.
XML causes global warming.
You can take this statement two ways, and I agree with both.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Whoops thought you did, sorry.
Good, Fast, Cheap, that's all good, but where does intel fit into the equasion?
Good? Ahem need i remind you of the Pentium 3 1133 recall and the Pentium 4 delay because it was crap and none of the OEMs wanted it?
Fast? Sure it's not insanely slow, so i have to give intel this one
Cheap? Gee, george it's not all that cheap, compared to Athlons, and with RDRAM added in it's fricken expensve
Intel 1 out of 3
AMD 2 out of 3
My question is, what the hell was intel doing while AMD was making the athlon
I have to disagree... I have a Dell laptop (Inspiron 7500), and have had two problems with it - one was a bad charging circuit on the MB, and the other was a dying HD. For the motherboard problem, I called Dell at about 11PM on Tuesday, was on the phone for less than a half hour (including on hold - I said what I thought it was, tech asked 2 questions and agreed), had it picked up the next afternoon, and I picked it up from FedEx on my way home from work on Friday (they tried to deliver, but it was signature required). For the HD problem (which could have very well been caused by shock), I emailed them, got their standard reply about testing to be sure that it was the HD (involving taking out the CD drive and making sure it's not the CPU fan), told them it was intermittant and wasn't gonna sit there with the CD/Floppy bay open until it happened, and was told the new drive would be shipped next day. Neither problems were necessarily bad parts (the charging issue might have been a power surge, as the power at work had been wacky the last few days before it - all the server UPSs kept kicking in), and Dell replaced stuff no questions asked. I'd definitely buy their stuff again.
My company has been in close contact with both AMD and motherboard manufacturers on this issue. We've seen a prototype of the dual Athlon/Duron motherboard and it sounds very good. We've also been hearing talk from AMD saying that the Duron will support SMP, but they don't expect to sell many like that. I remember when the Duron came out, they didn't think it would hurt Athlon sales, but look what happened (clock locking on the Duron). I'm glad I bought my Durons back when the multipliers weren't locked, because now I also have a better chance of them running SMP. Just my input, hope it helps.
I was just looking into this last night. Dolphin (A motherboard by Tyan) is due out in the last quarter this year. Thats what they say anyway. It will have ATA 100 support and DDR support, or so they claim. Tyan has no information on their website but you can pick up a snippet at AMDZone and the odd OCers webpage.
Bingeldac denies any responsibility for the
spelling and/or grammatical errors above.
>Yes. They invented multi-processing.
I thought Al Gore did...
No, Al Gore was on the DARPA team that developed ARPAnet, which eventually became the Internet.
<O
( \
XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
Will I retire or break 10K?
SMP means Symmetric MultiProcessing. Which, is where the processors work with the same memory, and are run by the same OS kernel.
-------
Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
I guess you mean no "mainstream" OS, but Unicos/mk (as in the OS for massively parallel Crays) supports that.
It is my understanding that there are boards in development using the 751 southbridge. It is hard for AMD to take away Intel's lunch without this. What I suspect has happened is that the board manufacturers ignored AMD until VIA came "on board" bigtime to give them a credible base.
I believe the company's name was "Hotrail" ... but I could be wrong on that one
Should that not be asynchronous multi-processing. An asymmmetric MP system is one where CPUs are dedicated to specific tasks. E.g. one CPU is used for the O/S, another for I/O and another for user applications. (A SMP system being one that can run any process on any CPU).
Doesn't Intel own several important patents regarding SMP for x86 systems?
Actually, I think the CPU does have to support an SMP option. Remember the Celerons? They were a PII based chip, but you could not run them dual...you needed to do some hack to it, and trick the hardware into seeing 2 PII's instead of 2 Celerons. So I think the chip maker has to support it AND the motherboard manufacturing company as well. Let's not forget here that AMD doesn't have most of the market share for CPU's and that most people run single-CPU OS's (I don't need to say it). Thus I'm sure that either company made a decision based on past research that there just wouldn't be enough demand for this kind of hardware. It kinda sucks, though, I really like dual systems as well.
Actually just this friday I was at an ASUS/AMD conference in Vancouver. And this was talked about. Early 1st Quarter 2001 there will be the AMD Mustang, which will support Dual CPU's on a 266mhz FSB motherboard. The neat thing is there will be two channels, so each processor will run at it's full potential, they did a test for a CAD client and compared the machine too a Dual Xeon 750 system (cost of system $20,000), and a Single Athalon Mustang 900 chip, (cost of system $2500), and it was faster than the XEON system. Also watch for the 1.5ghz Tbird chip to be available before XMAS.
few time ago we could read on a french site that AMD France has said during a conference ABIT-AMD AMD socket A support SMP (Duron or Athlon), a chipset should come at the end of the year : AMD760 MP. http://www.hardware.fr/html/news/index.php3?date=1 8-09-2000#2143
maybe we can hope see first bi-duron (or Athlon) box during the first months of next year!!
The problem with Asymmetric multi processing is that it limits the cpus ability to work together in any sense on a particular task. If one processor is working on instructions abcd and the other (slower one) is doing processes efg it would be difficult to predict when those instructions would get done. And thus things could get muddy in coordinated cpu tasks. Since I'm certain that AMD provides support for the lock x86 instruction then everything should be good(this is the instruction that makes certain that the cpux doesn't walk on cpuy's turf basically :-)
Interestingly enough the kernel code that supports SMP doesn't really care if there are varying speeds between the processors(this is true in linux at least). Anyway, the load should always go to the processor that can handle it best.
Jon
Ummm.... It wasn't National Semiconductor that they bought. They may have bought or licensed patents, but NSC is a seperate company with a market cap of $6.5 billion. Check it out at http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=nsm&d=t. NSC still has a sizable business manufacturing smaller specialized chips (as they have for many years now).
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
If AMD had just bothered to sell Athlons in Slot B form (rather just make a couple of slotB engineering samples), you could have had an SMP Athlon system a year ago. Same again if Asus had bought out a slotA/SlotB converter unit (like their slot1/Slot2 converter unit). I've seen SocketA/SlotA slockets for sale on a German website, so it is probably theoretically possible for a SocketA/SlotB slocket to exist too. However all these solutions are pie in the sky, because of the expense of Alpha 21264 motherboards, so you're best off just waiting till the AMD 760 chipset (which could in theory be used to make a 1000 processor system you just need an extra northbridge chip for every extra CPU), or the new VIA Athlon chipset that will be dual SMP compatible.
It's a simple fact. You can stick a ATI graphics card in one & it will work, you can also stick a Vibra16 Soundblaster in one & it will work too. The Alpha 21264 system was designed from the outset to be compatible with X86 peripherals.
Yes that's right, really good quality workstations have huge heatsinks without a fan on purpose as it's much quieter & you don't have to worry about a fatal crash if the fan stops working. They are designed that way with the heatsink directly below the powersupply. But its not an ordinary powersupply its one of those ones with a 92mm fan underneath, instead of an 80mm fan at the back, also the flow is reversed with the fan drawing air from the back via the powersupply & blowing it directly over the CPU heatsink (if the powersupply is not overly stressed the air does not end up more than a couple of degrees above ambient). The CPU heatsink is designed with the fins oriented so the air blows through from one side to the otherside (which is much more efficient than having a fan on top blowing down). Also the speed of the fan is dictated by both a thermister in the powersupply & the internal thermister diode in the CPU (or a thermister under the CPU), so the fan only speeds up when either the powersupply or the CPU needs extra cooling.You'll find all QUALITY workstations have cooling setups similar to the one I've outlined above.
>and would rather professional quality apps to "open source projects"
So open source isn't professional quality? I guess that makes Microsoft the most professional quality company on the face of the planet and Apache the most crashy POS on the planet.
FreeBSD must has 10,000 bugs and MacOS none, because, hey, it _is_ open source and therefore of non-professional quality.
Common man, you are gonna *have* to troll better than that!
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Funny you guys should bring this up. I sent an
email to AMD last week about this and
this is the response I received:
From: "hwsupti" 10/2/00 10:31 AM
Subject: Re: UNSOLVE Re: Multi-processor boards for AMD Athlon 1GHz and up
Hello Todd,
Currently, there are no dual processor motherboards available for the
Athlon.
New chipsets are under development by several companies that will support
multiprocessor systems. However, official release dates have not been
announced, so stay tuned to our web site for the latest information.
Best Regards,
AMD TSC
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
I forgot to point out that, unlike with the BX, Intel is now essentially segmenting the market between the cheaper single cpu 815 and the more expensive SMP 840 chipset. (Not to mention the RAM issues.)
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
My understanding is that Intel SMP was designed to run with different speed CPUs on the hardware level. However, doing so isn't supported under WinNT, and when someone mentioned it on the linux-kernel list, it didn't exactly sound like a configuration that Linux had been designed for either.
What OS are you running?
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Thanks for the details about AMD's SMP implementation. (I followed up that Intel's 2-way SMP boards aren't 'free' anymore either, so perhaps additional cost involved for AMD isn't serious.)
There, I just used the magic word
OK, now try selling $1500 of commodity parts for $10,000. Hard to do unless you can sell scalability. Which for the hardware guys means adding CPUs. (BTW, have you seen what IBM or Compaq charges for a server CPU upgrade board? It must be a 200% margin - that's why they love Intel.)
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
That's why large scale multiprocesser machines like IBM and SGI use NUMA instead of SMP. NUMA uses crossbar switching to dedicate portions of memory to each cpu. Basically, it eliminates the system bus; you can also mix and match cpu's.
Check it out:
http://www.sgi.com/origin/3000/numaflex.html
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Wrong -- National Semi is still an independent company. Nice try, tho.
"It is absurd to divide people into good or bad. People are either charming or tedious." --Oscar Wilde
I believe that Intel "owns" SMP in some intellectual property legal sense. Have they erected any obstacles to AMDs chips being more compatible with Intel SMP?
My experiences with NT SMP left me profoundly disappointed. NT seems particularly bad at keeping processes on the same processor all the time. So bad in fact that there's a setting (under task manager) you can use to force a process onto a particular CPU.
wasn't 3dNow! just amd's hacktogether response to MMX?
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
The Athlon uses the same EV6 protocol as DEC's Alphas (and also DEC's SMP protocol, whatever that might be called) and does not depend on Intels protocols at all.
Hmm...
;)
Seems to me that if the board is electrically compatible, and the majority of the microcode is X86 compatible, that it should be possible to "hack" the chipset by inserting Your own code based on the specs for the Athlon (I believe the chipset info needed is widely available). Of course not all the code NEED be in the flash, which would be the trick, if it wasn't (Can't really tell without the board).
Ofcourse I'd be REAL sure that the warranty on the board was void before I started
--- To err is human... Am I more human than most ?
Ummm no, the Dec Rainbow in 1981/2 used a Z80 for CPM & a 8088 for a Dos look alike...
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
True. Of course, it's possible to build a 1000 processor Athlon system using current Beowulf clusters as well - however, this is a long shot from having them all on the same front side bus...
I don't know much about Cray's implementation of a 1000 CPU configuration, but I get the feeling it's similar to running a fat pipe (say, 10GBPS ATM) between the systems, and then using a form of clustering like the above between a number of major processor arrays.
Regardless, the latencies involved would force engineers to design with separate physical memory pools, instruction caches, etc.
Of course, I'm not a Cray engineer...
I also heard that it (at least for the Thunderbird) is mainly a mainboard problem.
The register (www.theregister.co.uk) had a link to an Australian site one or two months ago, that had
a link to an high-ascii site in Asia with pictures
of experimental dual-athlon mobo's
I don't know if The register has an history option, but Slashdot could probably pull some strings there
How 'bout them apples?!
Btw, http://www.amd.com/news/prodpr/20165.html
--
This is of course very hard to believe, since the Intel 4004 is considered the first CPU ever. ;-)
I know this for a fact. A buddy of mine is down in Austin, TX doing a co-op with AMD. He actually does things with motherboard chipsets that AMD is working on. Anyway, when he went to Austin for the interview, he ate dinner with a couple of guys who had been doing co-ops with AMD. These guys where talking about RC5-DES performance on dual and quad Athlon motherboards. These guys where testing them in July. My buddy had also talked to a full-timer at AMD and asked when the SMP motherboards/chipsets would be ready for release. The guy said in about a year. They are having problems with chip caches when doing SMP. Or something to that effect, I'm not a hardware guy. Anyway, AMD has them and is testing them, working out the bugs. Another year yet (I hope).
No one, considering that the PIII line is going to be discontinued from development. It's P4 and Itanium time now.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
And yet they still use AC97 sound chipsets as well as buggy AGP, USB, and FireWire drivers. How pathetic.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
My suggestion: go for a Beowulf cluster or something similar. If seeing that just conjures up the urge to shout out, "That's too expensive!!!", then perhaps you haven't reserved enough funding for your computer, and should stick with what works.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I didn't even say the word "Intel" in my parent post, did I? No. So why are you going out on a limb like this?
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Remember Murphy's Law stating "Anything that will go wrong, WILL go wrong?" I guess the engineers are busy re-designing the chipset after a power failure over at AMD occurred when they plugged in their new 20GHz Athlon. Thanks to Microsoft, they didn't save their work. Anything that will go wrong, WENT wrong.
What I really would have wanted to do (1.5 years back) would be to run a dual k6-3 500... Oh well :)
SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! (That was awful)
So many x86 clone vendors, so few profits...
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Ugh, that was supposed to be a reply to the previous item...
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
One of the side-effects of that merger is that AMD and Intel have a very comprehensive patent cross-licensing deal, which was "inherited" from National Semiconductor. This is why Intel has not attempted to sue AMD for patent infringement since the days of the K5 cpu. It's also the reason that Intel forced the "Slot 1" bus architecture down the throats of most of the mobo companies a few years back: it was "new" and thus not covered by the agreement. Unfortunatly, it also turned out to be both a political and an engineering mistake, leading to the current chilly relationship between Chipzilla and most of the taiwanese mobo companies... ~
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
I was talking to the amd rep about a week ago when he swung by compusa. He was telling me about how abit is going to be realising a dual thunderbird/duron motherboard in a fiew weeks. and about a dual duron board, you can get a 700 thunderbird for about 7 bucks more than you can get a duron on pricewatch.com.
AMD Zone certainly has a lot of info on this lot. You can pretty well find out most things if you dig deep enough.
Intel boards can do this already, it's not really effective though since the faster chip is usually left waiting because the schedulers aren't too clever. Also, SMP can be unstable if you combine chips of different steppings.
AMD had dual Athlon 1000 running as the game servers at QuakeCon 2000 back in Aug. But I haven't seen a motherboard for sale that can take two athlons :(
>The Apple SMP systems seem fairly nice, but rather expensive Actually are about the same price their the normal G3 went for when first released. So you are basically getting a dual system for the price you could have expected to pay for a single G4. >unless I can specify the specs You can customize your computer if you buy it though Apples web site, they don't have tons of options but about as many as any company, DELL, Gateway, HP etc, when it comes to customizing a pre built computer.
Way back in December, AMD, Samsung and Compaq announced a co-operative to design and manufacture a chipset codenamed "Caspian".
;) - Although I doubt that it would be as easy as swapping a chip (seeing as the Athlon and the Alpha use seperate Slot/Socket combos).
Enjoy;
Dave
"Caspian will support both the Alpha and Athlon processors using the Alpha EV6 bus architecture common to both devices."
See the story on EBNEWS
But, since then I have yet to see any other news about this partnership.
Going from an Athlon to an Alpha would definately be a sweet upgrade!
#>Dave
These AC's are right. You might not like the topic, but you're adding nothing worthwhile to the thread. Posts like 'wtf?' disappoint me far more than the topic itself.
My post added nothing either. I recognize this hypocrisy.
I've seen similarly conflicting schedules for the release of this chipset....
Anyone know of any other reputable AMD rumor sites?
Almost right..
Indeed, Hotrail to cancel their 8 way AMD chipset, but the company who took it on themselves to work on is Alpha Processors Inc (API)
Hetz (Heunique)
It's a known feature of the Athlon. In fact, one of the things AMD was proud of is that in SMP configurations, each CPU apparently gets its own frontside bus into the chipset IIRC. Even the K6 (Maybe, definately the K6-2 and K6-3) supported SMP. Problem was, it was not the same SMP scheme as used by the classic Pentium, and there was never an SMP mobo made for it. I hope the same thing doesn't happen to the Athlon. (Although from what I remember, an SMP chipset was due relatively soon on AMD's chipset roadmap. As in by the end of the year, I think.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
That's why the K6 had SMP support.
But unfortunately, the workaround made the K6 SMP protocol incompatible with that of the Pentium. And AMD wasn't big enough at the time for any chipset/mobo manufacturer to justify creating a new SMP mobo for a small market.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Just to let you know - The K6 SMP support was OpenAPIC. Too bad no one made a mobo for it. Don't know if the Athlon is or a different protocol. (I think it may be different - Considering how different the bus/cache design is from the old Socket 7 designs in general.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
You named exactly the opposite reasons that one should consider buying a Dell. They are not quality systems (really - they use lesser quality components, unless you pay big bucks for their higher grade models). They are not easy to maintain (their "thumb-buster" case design is my arch nemesis). Or at least, not any easier than any other PC in the world, and in many cases harder, with their poor case design.
They are not even homogenous. Go to Dell's site, and look up a given model, then check, say, audio drivers. There will be 15 different audio drivers mentioned. Yes, they really do use different audio chipsets in systems with the exact same badge designation (i.e. Dimension XPS600R). And no, they can't tell you what chipset you have in your system if you go to their web site and punch in your unique "service code" from the back of your system.
About the only thing homogenous about Dells are the ugly, thumb-busting, nasty cases.
The ONLY reason to buy Dell is that they will replace any nonfunctioning part of your system, at their cost (shipping included), if you are patient enough to sit through 3 or 4 tech calls and go through their standardized rigamarole (sp?) for determining what component is bad (yeah, you may know that it is the video card, but the Dell techie has to convince himself as well).
I am NOT talking "out of my hat" (a phrase I am unfamiliar with, but which I assume means, making things up).
We have had:
* A Dell system which would shut itself off after 3 or 4 minutes, every single time it was powered on. After being patient with Dell tech support over the course of several weeks while they tried sending new memory, a new motherboard, and a new power supply (not all at once, but over the course of several weeks), they finally took back the whole system, after determining that it was their goofy power switch (I suspected this from the beginning). The good news is that they replaced a two year old Pentium 233 system with a brand new Pentium II 400 system at no cost to us.
* Dell's audio cards in their Dimension models of two years ago used this crummy, Dell-only version of the Montego sound card which the Turtle Beach people would not provide support for. Dell had cut a special deal with Turtle Beach to provide a cheaper version of their card that Dell would support, so that Dell could save a couple of bucks. The only drivers that Dell could provide for Windows NT would blue screen the system when you tried to install them.
* We have had many, many of the mice on Dell systems go bad. OK, they are Microsoft Mice, not really Dell's fault, but still. They could have chosen better mice.
* We have had two or three Dell monitors go bad. They were replaced without cost to us by Dell but it was a bit of a pain.
We have about 65 Dell systems where I work. Maybe the above problems are par for the course for PC's, but I would have a hard time believing that they are better than average.
Furthermore, Dell's cases DO suck. Trust me. Let one age for about a year and a half and then try to open it. You WILL bust your thumbs. Their case design is STUPID. I have worked with many cases. Screwless cases are not a big deal anymore. They are a dime a dozen. But 99% of them are designed MUCH better than Dell's cases. We have at least three or four systems on which the case no longer fits properly because of the force required to open them after they have frozen shut, and the fact that they are held in place by some rather soft plastic.
I have an Enlight case at home and it is by no means special or unique. It is FAR easier to work with than any Dell case I have ever used. No modern case is going to make it difficult to add hard drives. Trust me, I work on these things ALOT, I know a crappy case when I see one, and Dell's really suck.
I am NOT "spouting hackneyed Slashdot wisdom". I have quite a bit of experience supporting Dell systems. I know what I am talking about. Dell has its good points and bad points, but the original poster did not hit on the good points and spoke of some of Dell's bad points as being good.
Why would that be impossible? The Cray T3E managed to make use of that many Alpha processors, although they're using the EV5 and not the EV6 architecture, like the Athlon.
No doubt he meant 1000 processor SMP machine. The T3E is an MPP machine. A 1000 processor SMP machine would suffer way too much bus contention to be worthwhile, even as a 'because I can' hack. It would be hard to imagine an application that could benefit from such a set-up. Even harder to imagine one that wouldn't work as well or better on an MPP machine.
The Apple SMP systems seem fairly nice, but rather expensive.
It's not a realistic alternative unless I can specify the specs rather than living with whatever AAPL tells me I can buy.
I've idly watched the OpenPPC project; apparently the direct offspring, Pop Computers, found that they had severe procurement problems.
This does not a viable market make.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Actually, he's been to a great deal of hardware sites, but he found very little solid information.
First, he went to AMD's web site. He browsed it thoroughly, and then did a number of searches. He discovered that AMD has essentially no information on their website about SMP, period. Almost no mention of it, even.
He then checked out Tom's hardware, Ars Technica, as well as 4 other similar hardware review and news sites. Do you know what he found there? A few rumors about AMD's supporting SMP, a single mention of 760MP chipset, without any dates or informaiton on it, and a couple of claims that AMD would have an SMP motherboard out sometime in 2001.
He wasn't impressed with most of the information out there.
You see, I wasn't looking for vague rumors, I was looking for facts. I was hoping that someone might have heard something from a reputable source, or someone might have a URL or two to a site that I haven't checked.
I'm glad that you were able to provide some insightful commentary here. Thank you for helping 'make slashdot what it has become'.
--
Toph
Topher
The hardware support for those G4 machines is sparse.
OS X doesn't offer a command line unless you buy server or developer versions for a lot more money.
Linux, I don't think is running on those machines.
OS X is slower than Linux on the same platform.
Yes, there IS a SMP alternative to Intel- and it's called Alpha. They're insanely great machines- just insanely expensive as well. G4 an alternative to Intel? Only when Motorola or IBM get off their duffs and sell SMP machines with the G4's processors.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Intresting. I havn't heard about this issue. When my old (duel) PPro motherbord died, I bought a K7, and a K7 motherbord, and PC100 memory (ECC, because I'm that way), and an ATX mobo and PC Power And Cooling power supply (because it is quiet, and the same brand I've been buying for years, and was one of the few things that AMD did say there were compatability problems with). I took all the cards and drives from the old system and moved them to the new system.
They all worked. Including my generic NCR SCSI. Including my oddball ISA sound card. Including my cheap as crap ISA video card. Both of which I had bought for the PC I first built in 1992! I did get rid of the ISA sound card a few weeks later (FreeBSD funally stopped supporting it a decade after the makers went bankrupt, and I didn't feel like fixing the driver myself). I got rid of the graphics card too (so I could be ISA free -- it is my home server, and runs with no monitor most of the time, so the crappy graphics were just fine). Both were replaces with "store brand" PCI cards costing about $30 each.
Zero compatability problems.
Have you personally seen any compatability problems? Did the failed part work in another machine?
I hope so too. But I have little hope of Compaq doing it. After all they have the multi-way chipset (40+ CPUs) for the Alpha which would take little or no tweaking to work with the K7 "just" a BIOS, which shouldn't be hard for the first compony to reverse engener the IBM PC BIOS....
P.S. now that I think back on it, the ISA video ard may not have been from '92, it may have been newer then that. But the sound card was that old (ProAudio Spectrum bought at a Microprose employe discount not all that long before the compony that made 'em vanished, nice card though)
Slashdot has been really disappointing me lately. Besides the usual crap that is posted in the news, look at what Ask Slashdot has turned into. The dumbest questions get posted. Like "I want to find a job" thing yesterday. Now this. If Christopher Cashell ever bothered to go to any of the hardware sites, he would find the answer to his question in about 5 minutes. Let me guess, the next Ask Slashdot question will be "What is Linux?"
___
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
In fact, they are SMP limited by the chipsets: If a chipset existed, you could run a box with 1000 Athlon processors - of course, designing such a beast would be impossible...
Why would that be impossible? The Cray T3E managed to make use of that many Alpha processors, although they're using the EV5 and not the EV6 architecture, like the Athlon.
I doubt that designing that beast would be desirable, though. There aren't that many companies who know how to build systems scaling up to 1000+ CPUs. Cray is one such company, and SGI seems to be another (allegedly building a 1024-CPU Origin 3000 on special order).
But impossible? No.
(This is, of course, blatantly ignoring that "chipset" is a very, uhm, simplified way of speaking about multi-CPU support.)
I e-mailed ASUS and one other Mobo maker asking this question. I got one reply, 'nothing in the works right now'. About two months ago.
Can it use the old celeron chips?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Sorta. As I recall, Intel owns patents which cover the APIC (Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller), and these patents are related to APIC programming in an SMP environment. The K5 and K6's used the OpenPIC standard to avoid this, but there were no OpenPIC boards and so effectively no SMP w/ K5 and K6.
The EV6-style SMP that Athlon uses avoids both of these issues by using an SMP model which has existing boards (the SMP Alpha boards) and which isn't covered by Intel's patents. (Of course, the Alpha boards can't be used directly for some reason, but at least they're closer than the non-existant boards for the K5s and K6s). I imagine the EV6-style SMP requires different OS support, though. That is, Linux, BeOS and WinNT would all need different SMP drivers for the SMP Athlon boards to replace the APIC code. (Basically, they avoid the Intel patent by not designing to Intel's MP spec, but that would imply that OSes need to have differen't MP drivers to support it.)
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Any limitations on the number of CPUs is going to be in the chipset either in the number of pins (about 100/cpu) it can support, or in internal queuing stuff in the chipset keeping track of outstanding cache probes - the bus protocol itself is refreshingly free of such stuff.
Are you sure about that? Nothing like each chip being assigned a number out of a small and fixed pool of chip IDs?
The number 14 looks very suspicious to me in this regard (2^4 - 2).
OTOH, I haven't read detailed specs on the EV6 bus, and Compaq has recently started offering SMP systems with maximum processor counts greater than 14.
You can currently do that with intel boards. A friend of mine tried it on a BP6 using a 500 Mhz celeron and a 400 Mhz celeron. As for OS support to intelligently schedule jobs that take more time it could be done. As far as I know no OS has logic for differently clocked chips. It is something that could be added but would it be worth the trouble. How many people are really gonna buy several different speeds for a box.
Exactly, its the motherboards. I wonder if they are running into trouble? I hope not, because I have been specifically holding out for a dual AMD system. It sure feels like a long wait...
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
I participated in the Nextech 2000 conference in Austin Texas. One part of the conference was taking a trip to AMD where we got to ask questions of the various interns there. One of the people there was working on getting the glitches out of the motherboards with multi-processors. If I remember correctly, he said that they were very close, but there were still a couple of issues that had to be resolved. Unfortunately, they weren't allowed to tell us much more than that. The trip was the end of July, just in case you wanted to know.
I don't remember the source offhand, but I remember reading that SMP Socket A (Tbird/Duron) mobos would be out around January.
"If ignorance is bliss, may I never be happy.
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
> From what I understand, the 760MP should be finished between December and January, and on store shelves late Q1 2000.
Can you build SMP systems incrementally? I.e., buy a 760 motherboard and a single CPU for starters, and then add a second CPU as an upgrade a few months later?
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The BX chipset gives you 2 CPU support 'for free' -- we'll see if the AMD chipset does the same, or if you need to buy a special SMP chipset.
;-)
Seems unlikely. The electrical interface that AMD uses (which is the same one DEC's Alpha uses) is not, in fact, a bus architecture, but rather a port. Each CPU has dedicated lines to the a "hub" chip. So you would need significantly more silicon to make a dual-processor chipset, as compared to a single-processor chipset. It seems generally agreed that this design is superior to the Intel bus design (it scales to 1000s of processors, compared to Intel's eight), but it does make thing a bit trickier on the low-end.
SMP Systems have a huge margin advantage over single CPU systems.
Very true. Why do SMP systems cost so much more? Because the people using them are willing to pay so much more.
With SMP you can start using the magic words "server" and "workstation" which translates into higher profits for the resellers.
"Server". There, I just used the magic word on a single-processor system!
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Well, I do the buying for our company and yes, I am one of you guys (techie, not PHB); I'm senior mgmt and run Linux on my desk :-) We are a startup and $$$ are important.
My policy is to buy Dell returns from DFO for desktops (they are new, just no warranty) and yes, they all come with Intel CPU's (Dell's choice not mine). We are now getting P3-733's with 133 frontside as "used" Dells. They are single CPU boxes. The reasons for my Dell-only are quality, homogeneity, ease of maintenance.
The cost difference between AMD and Intel is not enough to materially impact this policy, as I'd need to go with a different vendor; most business class machines (most of my desktops are for developers) only come with Intel, Compaq's AMD boxes are all low end.
All our servers (production and office) are low end SMP capable, and are either USparc-III (Sun Ex50's) or 2-way P3 boxes (Penguin, Dell, IBM).
Where I'd really kill for a good AMD is in the laptop arena - we use midrange laptops, mostly for business people (sales and marketing) who don't really need performance. In keeping with our frugal policy, we don't get monitors but we do make sure laptops have decent displays (1024x768 TFT) and this means we are forced to buy Celerons, which suck.
We have one real el-cheapo laptop, a bottom of the range $1000 Toshiba which we use as a test console for the server rooms. It was mine before we got venture capital. It has an AMD, K6-3 I think. The screen sucks (800x600 DS) but it kicks a $2000 Celeron laptop for performance, and the power consumption is very modest.
If I could get a decent midrange laptop with a good screen and an AMD cpu, I'd buy one in a heartbeat; on both performance and battery life, AMD kicks butt in the mobile market.
Doesn't it only support 8? Or did they change the constant in R5?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Uh no. SSE is uses 128bit registers, 3DNow! uses 64bit registers. SSE contains more instructions that does 3DNow! Those two facts alone mean they cannot be clones.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
But AMD's CPUs AREN'T clones of Intel. And that analogy is still wrong because while AMD and Intel CPUs are instruction set compatible, SSE and 3DNow! aren't. Lastly, you can't say SSE is a "hacktogether" response because I'm pretty sure they were working on it before 3DNow! was released. (What, you think you can put together an instruction set in a couple of months? KNI (Katmai New Instructions) were in planning a while before 3DNow! came out.) Also, SSE is in many ways superior to 3DNow!. It has more developer support, it has a wider range of instructions, and when fully implemented (which it is not in the PIII series) it is twice as fast (due to the whole 128 vs. 64 bit thing.)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Intel moves to .13 in 8 months? I would like to see that..
.18->.13 die shrink of the P3. Northwood, the .13 P4, isn't due until Q4. (It'll be a lot easier for them to test and get the kinks out of the shrink with an old core that they understand very well than with a new.) Remember, they're already working on the shrink now.
Here's the latest roadmap, in Japanese pastel no less.
8 months at the earliest--i.e. Q3 of next year. And that's for Tualatin, their
The real story about Intel that their Pentium 4 is being manufactured here in Israel (in Kiryat Gat), and they got LOTS of problems with that (like low numbers of chips on 1 waffer, only 2 machines to product the P4), so until Intel gets more machines to produce those chips - this will take long time.
This story was posted here in the Israeli newspapers..
Well if it was a repeat of this piece at The Register, it may have misinterpreted things. For one thing, 70% yield on a new chip is quite impressive. For another, while a yield of 70,000 chips/week is not enough to substantially affect the x86 market, 70,000 represents more CPUs made in a week (and before launch no less) than there were 1 GHz P3s made for the first 6 months after its "launch"!
In any case, no OEM is going to buy many of the initial P4s, because Intel is planning a packaging change in March or so. That means new motherboards, new systems, and another entire validation process for OEM's--something that most of them are not going to want to waste time doing twice. Thus they'll only offer a couple models, in limited quantities, of the original P4, so it doesn't matter that only limited quantities will be fabbed.
In essence the first P4 will be positioned quite a bit like the original PPro. Whether the Willamette core ends up as successful as the P6 core has (remember, the PPro introduced the core now powering Celeron and P3) will be interesting to see.
I think the reason people get the impression that AMD chips are not top of the line, is because of the poor compatability with other components. I've had a lot of problems getting AMD chips to play nice with my other cards. For a server, I don't see this being an issue, as you can always find *one* SCSI card, video card, to work just fine with the chipset. Hopefully DELL, Compaq and and company will release "Interprise Level" servers featuring 8 way AMD chipsets. Doing so would add a lot to the credability in the mindset of the average buisnessman. -Jon
this is my sig.
The company that AMD had licensed the Athlon bus to was HotRail, formerly Poseidon Technology, decided in June that it was no longer profitable to remain in the PC chipset business, and put their 8-way chipset on the back burner, in order to focus all their strenghs on Networking switches and transceivers.w s/story/OEG20000501S0051">Here</a& gt; is an article about their switch of plans
<a href="http://www.ebnonline.com/ecomponents/commne
Stop over-analyzing your analizations
AMD is working on the 760 chipset which is the DDR chipset, later this year or early next there will be another revison (760MP) which will support SMP, all current Durons and Thunderbirds are SMP capable.
How do you think that SSE & SSE2 will be implimented in upcoming AMD CPUs starting with the mustang.
IIRC, KNI/SSE is just a clone of 3DNow! which debuted in the AMD K6 line.
<O
( \
XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
Will I retire or break 10K?
With all other variables equal (bus speed, HD speed, etc.), a 500 MHz PowerPC G3 is approximately twice as fast as a 1 GHz Intel PII/P!!! at doing hard-core integer number crunching (Photoshop, some 3D games in software mode, d.net) according to the SPEC integer math benchmark. And the vector unit in G4 is quite a bit easier to code for than the vector unit in PIII, giving even more speed and boosting Team Slashdot's RC5 rating.
<O
( \
XPlay Tetris On Drugs!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Intel holds the patent for APIC, the smp structure. AMD will need to use openAPIC or their own standard before they can release. This means the kernel may need some work before supporting it.
Eat right. Stay fit. Die anyway.
You killed the first post kiddies! You bastard!
This has got to be the first time in recent slashdot history that a "post #1" has gotten any moderation other than down...
I think this deserves a toast, a slashdot story, and a redundent story, just to be sure!
I would think that it would not currently be profitable for the mobo makers to get into the dual-processor game, with the technology moving so fast and the next generation of chips right around the corner.
is to say I have a "Duron-Duron" setup....
One of the problems with 21x64 and thus Athlon chipsets is that the busses are designed to handle high front side bus speeds. To do this, the bus is a point to point bus with the processor connecting directly to the chipset. This translates to more wires and pins on SMP chipsets. The issue is further complicated by caching issues. Alphas use an L3 cache which the chipset controls to share data amoungst SMP nodes. This increases the compexity of SMP chipsets for the architecture. Other people have also mentions, and correctly from what I have heard, that AMD had no desire to produce chipsets, and this has probably been a reason they where slower to ramp up additional higher end chipsets. VIA might very well do similar sets, but I imagine AMD does not want to place all its eggs in that basket.
One of the side-effects of that merger is that AMD and Intel have a very comprehensive patent cross-licensing deal, which was "inherited" from National Semiconductor. This is why Intel has not attempted to sue AMD for patent infringement since the days of the K5 cpu. It's also the reason that Intel forced the "Slot 1" bus architecture down the throats of most of the mobo companies a few years back: it was "new" and thus not covered by the agreement. Unfortunatly, it also turned out to be both a political and an engineering mistake, leading to the current chilly relationship between Chipzilla and most of the taiwanese mobo companies...
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Hey all, I posted a story that got declined by the forces that be at /. but "The Register" a uk web rag
reported last week or the one before that the 760
chipset is going to be out 1st Quarter 2001 in SMP fashion for T-Bird and Duron chips.
The Register
Its alos the home of the BOFH stories for those that are interested.
From there I think it likely that AMD will produce 4, 8, 16, etc chips-per-die instead of plugging them into a motherboard. Although I guess it depends when they run into the bandwidth bottleneck.
Suppose that's when they'll start pumping that EV6 DDR bus up to 400mhz, etc.
Drooling profusely here.
All Socket A Athlons and Durons are multiprocessing enabled. They only require a new chipset to do so. AMD is developing the 760MP for this purpose. It will also support DDR SDRAM. This topic will be discussed in much detail at the Microprocessor Forum next week. VIA may or may not develope a multiprocessor capable chipset for AMD processors. Hotrail was developing a chipset that would support 4 and more processors, but they dropped the project. I'll be covering all news of the 760MP next week at AMDZone, and expect Tuesday to be the big news day if you are interested in the 760MP. There should be a load of new information, and possibly a press release or two.
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
According to the hardware spec of the Thunderbird and the Duron they support SMP. As for the older Athlons (with the slower cache) they do (from what I understand) NOT support SMP! So be careful, and don't buy an old one.
:-)
Both AMD and VIA are planning SMP chipsets. Check out http://www.viahardware.com/roadmap2000.shtm for VIA's roadmap. There should be a chipset out just in time for Christmas if we're lucky!
I remember reading an article about a test of a Dual Thunderbird board, but I can't remember where... It was a beta board with a very early release of VIA's chipset anyway. They didn't actually test the SMP, they guys were more interested in the DDR support...
Cheers,
There have been LOTS of problems with AMD chips. Actually, more precisely, the problems have mostly been with the chipsets, which AMD themselves didn't want to make -- they were really hoping the third-party market would do that for them, but nobody stepped up to bat with a really good chipset for the Athlon until very recently.
Quite some time before the Athlon came out, I myself bought a K6-2/300 (which I still have, happily chugging away as a Linux server) and had all kinds of hassles with the Aladdin V chipset and various and sundry cards. I eventually ended up buying a BX-chipset board instead, and was much much happier with it. Even now Linux doesn't run as well as it should, as it doesn't seem to have any support for that IDE chipset and leaves all the drives in non-DMA mode. It doesn't do much work so that's okay for me, but it's a bit annoying.
With Athlon machines, the biggest problem was simply inadequate power supplies. Those chips suck power like nothing else before them (I think the new P4 will suck even more!) and if you put a nice fast GeForce DDR (another power hog) in there, many motherboards and/or power supplies were simply overwhelmed by the demand. Your purchase of that PCPAC power supply was probably the best money you spent in that machine, and may have saved you lots of trouble.
There have also been AGP driver issues with some of the Athlon chipsets, though I haven't yet owned one and don't know the details. I CAN tell you that the compatibility problems have been severe enough that I held off buying an Athlon. It sounds like the KT133 chipset has it pretty well together, finally, but I will probably hold out a bit longer and go SMP when those ship. I haven't done an SMP machine yet for myself, though I have wanted to for a long time.
Oh, another thought: it sounds like you had pretty good luck with your system, but remember that you weren't running fast 3-d graphics and/or Win9X either -- video drivers have been especially problematic. You were running against 'old' standards that are very well documented and easily testable. A lot of people are buying Athlons to game with, and gaming taxes a system harder than almost anything else you can do with it. AGP appears to be something of an evolving standard, too, so there are all sorts of niggling little details that differ from chipset to chipset, and can cause weird behavior that you would never see on a BSD-based server.
My $0.02.
Tyan is almost done with their SMP Athlon board. It should be released soon.
-- Ted tsikora@powerusersbbs.com
Should be possible with Athlon, too. You can leave CPU sockets without CPU in Intel SMP configurations and the remaining CPUs are used properly. However, you have to put in termination dummies in order to not degrade the CPU bus signal quality. Since AMD uses the Alpha way for SMP, it won't have a CPU bus but separate ports on the chipset for every CPU, so you may not need terminators for those.
In fact, they are SMP limited by the chipsets: If a chipset existed, you could run a box with 1000 Athlon processors
Actually, my understanding was that limitations in the bus protocol limited SMP machines to 14 processors, as with Alpha machines. For more than that, you use a hierarchical scheme or clustering.
It is not the CPU but the Motherboard that can't support SMP. Maybe the MB manufacturers are waiting on a reference board or chipset from AMD? Does anyone know if the Irongate chipset is the holdback or is it simply the Motherboard configuration? (I have a feeling that the AMD motherboard chipset is not ready)
--------------------
Kyle at HardOCP posted up a link to an interesting synopsis of an AMD seminar. AMD confirmed that VIA would be supplying an SMP chipset which will be able to run two Socket A CPUs.
These should be available this fall. As we all know; VIA has no problem introducing a new chipset to the motherboard manufacturers and no doubt will have no problem getting boards made with their chipset. As many of us know, the same Irongate chipset that many of us use for Slot A Athlons was perfectly capable of running the Socket A CPUs as well and was always available to motherboard manufacturers. Despite this, manufacturers still opted to use a VIA chipset instead and delay availability of their boards because of this.
Plan to see SMP as production exceeds demand or at least keeps abreast of it. Also it has been widely reported that AMD is concentrating on introducing the "Sledgehammer" with an SMP MB chipset almost from introduction.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
The boot 'ROM' code is probably in Flash, so could be blasted with x86 code. The peripherals which have boot code have x86 code already, as the Alpha supports x86 emulation even at the lowest levels. FatPhil
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Can someone who has knowledge about operating systems, especially process cheduling, comment that a bit? Can users be sure that the most CPU hungry thread/process is run on the fastest CPU?
--
By the way: AMD has no plans to cripple it's Duron processors.
p ost_id=15000265 - all Durons will be SMP capable, and, AFAIK, they should take full advantage of the 133MHz / PC266 DDR motherboards.
http://www.aceshardware.com/Spades/read_news.php?
The Alpha motherboard is close, but probably won't win the cigar.
Motherboards include ROMs, for things like setup, BIOS and booting up in the first place. Alpha uses a different instruction set, so a 386-instruction chip like Athlon wouldn't read it.
The mobo vendor could probably do an AMD port of the board. API is unlikely to since their job is to sell Alpha processors, not mobos. Somebody else with an Alpha SMP mobo would be a better candidate.
The reason SMP is still unavailable for the Athlon line of CPUs is that the current chipsets have no way of supporting it.
The first Chipsets capable of supporting SMP, AMD's 760MP(a SMP-enabled version of the 760, due out very late this year or early next year) and the 770 chipset, which is expected to have support of up to 4 CPUs, and due out early next year.
As far as VIA and otehr third-party chipset manufacturers, they are still awaitin a chipset from AMD, before they can begin making their own SMP chipsets.
AMD's plans for a more advanced (4 and 8-way)chipset also had to be canceled when the company they were working with (forgot the name at the moment) decided to leave the server chipset business, leaving AMD to work on the chipsets on its own.
Stop over-analyzing your analizations
You are correct in regards to the processor's support for SMP. The current crop of Athlons (including the Athlon classic) are SMP capable.
p ost_id=10000214
In fact, they are SMP limited by the chipsets: If a chipset existed, you could run a box with 1000 Athlon processors - of course, designing such a beast would be impossible...
At any rate, Ace's Hardware has been covering AMD's products fairly diligently. They've posted several articles about the 760MP (The SMP capable Athlon chipset.) One good example is available here: http://www.aceshardware.com/Spades/read_news.php?
From what I understand, the 760MP should be finished between December and January, and on store shelves late Q1 2000.
From what I read awhile back, the next VIA chipset will have SMP for Thunderbird AND Duron. It will also have DDR support.
I bet that not long after this chipset hits that companies like Abit have dual socket A motherboards, and for an attractive price. Especially considering that 700 MHz Durons, which are in some respects (FPU) better than a 700 Mhz P3, can be had for under $90...
It sucks how slow SMP for Athlon has been coming, but I think when it does hit, Intel will lose a lot of face. The "Mustang" core Athlon is supposed to be the next stage, a chip that competes with Intel's way WAY overpriced Xeon line.
In 2000 America, is a non-lawyer truly free?
As others have said, the first SMP chipset for the K7 family is the 760MP, due out in December or January. AMD has already released the single-processor 760 chipset--which looks to be the first DDR-capable PC chipset--to motherboard manufacturers; motherboards based on the 760 should be showing up at the end of this month.
;) the market for SMP boxes is primarily business servers. This presents two issues:
.13um process--in about 8 months. The 512kb, 1Mb and 2Mb L2 cache Xeons won't move above 800MHz or so in that time. Meanwhile, the new P4 chips are *not* SMP capable (or at least there will be no SMP chipsets available for them). Itanium is a joke and will likely never be launched. Now, Foster, the "P4 Xeon" will be released, possibly as soon as January, but the large-cache versions of Foster won't be out until Q2.
It has been pointed out that one of the major reasons AMD has taken so long to get SMP going is that they already sell all of their processors anyways, and already have commitments for all the K7 chips they can make through the end of the year. This is true, but misses a more important point: with some few exceptions (i.e. nerds like us
1) Many if not most Intel SMP boxes are currently stuffed with Xeons. Thus, AMD has been perfectly content waiting for the release of their upcoming "Mustang" core tweak, featuring up to 1MB L2 cache--due out...you guessed it...in December or January--before rolling out the 760MP. Conversely, the big-L2 Mustangs without an SMP-capable chipset are dead-in-the-water.
2) By and large, business still clings to the notion of AMD as a cut-rate unreliable chip company. Despite the fact that knowledgable consumers have switched over to the cheaper faster Athlon in droves, Intel still has a nearly complete monopoly over the x86 business market. This impression of AMD as the "cheapo generic brand" persists despite Intel racking up delay after delay, errata after errata, recall after recall, embarrassment after embarrassment (i820, i840, 1.13GHz P3, Itanium) in the past year and a half. AMD knows that if they release the 760MP and it runs into one rumor of one conflict with one obscure 3D graphics card no business machine would ever contain anyways, their foray into the high-margin world of business computing is over before it began. (Never mind that Intel can release the i840, their new workstation-quality top-of-the-line chipset, with an "errata" which rendered it unusable with ECC memory!) Thus they are being very careful, and rightly so, with their validation process on this one.
Interestingly enough, if they get their act together (and purchasing departments take their heads out of their asses), AMD has a major market opportunity on their hands here. The Coppermine Xeon (i.e. a plain-old Coppermine P3 with $200 tacked on to the price) is incapable of scaling past 1GHz until Intel moves to a
That leaves AMD with a quarter as the sole supplier of GHz+ large-cache multiprocessing x86 CPUs. Will that be enough to get them into the lucrative enterprise market?? Hard to say. After all, you never get fired for buying Intel...
I have read on internet (www.aceshardware.com I think) that you can use existing alpha mb to put K7 into it; word is the K7 uses the Slot A (DEC Alpha) interface and so is supposed to support alpha style SMP. So the K7 should have nice SMP, scable up to 32 processors.
If you wanted just dual processors, this implies A UP2000 or suchlike would do the job, but I can't say for sure.
Here's a qoute from Paul Jakma
Interestingly the new *Alpha* 21264 UP1000 motherboard uses the AMD Irongate chipset.. they also have a dual 21264 UP2000 board based on a DEC chipset. So it seems K7/Alpha chipsets are interchangeable, so then K7 SMP is probably possible using the DEC chipset.
And here's a qoute from Acehardware.com:
Alpha:Slot-A:Slot-B:Athlon KH Yeap Wednesday,
June 23, 1999 (10:00 AM EST)
Ok, at the ongoing PC Expo in New York, Alpha
Processor Inc. is demo'ing its new
Alpha-21264 750 Mhz, which is expected to
come out in July. More interestingly a 1 Ghz
versions of the processor, which runs under
regular air-cool condition, is also demo'ed
along with a Slot-A motherboard, UP1000, and
a Slot-B motherboard, UP2000. For further
details check out this News.com report.
Now, a lot of people have been wondering
about the possibility of running a K7 on an
Alpha Slot-A or Slot-B motherboard. According
to Alpha, yes, this is possible. To make
things even more interesting Alpha's new
Slot-A motherboard, UP1000, uses a chipset
that is a hybrid between AMD's very own K7
chipset, Irongate (AMD-751), and ALI's
M1543C!! PC Watch Japan has a great shot of
this UP1000 motherboard. Also appears on PC
Watch is a photo of the Slot-B UP2000 and a
photo of the 1 Ghz Slot-B Alpha processor.
Special thanks to Daiki for this wonderful
tips.
So, you could try an Alpha dual-processor Motherboard but I can't give you any garuntees.
Michael
...another comment from Michael Tandy.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion