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AMD and Intel CPUs Supported On Same Motherboard
Kez writes "We haven't seen AMD and Intel CPUs since Socket 7, but ECS have created a motherboard sporting both Intel LGA775 and AMD 939 sockets. An Intel chip will sit in the board itself, whereas an AMD chip can be used through a daughterboard. HEXUS.net has the scoop from CeBIT." While this is pretty slick, I do wonder who is actually gonna buy this board in place of their usual favorite, since it's not like people are swapping their processors around every chance they get, unless they don't actually use the computer they've built.
It isn't the same motherboard though. As far as I could tell from TFA the only shared bit are the PCI-E and PCI buses.
I can't see it being cheaper to buy the AMD daughterboard than to buy a real AMD mobo - all this saves you is the hassle of moving your cards across.
If you could use both at once it would be cool but as it is it seems extremely pointless.
I guess today is a passable day to die.
That's a great idea.
Now instead of buying a higher quality but slightly more expensive board (like an nForce type or its Intel-compatable cousin, whatever that is) you can buy a cheap-ass ECS board with gimpy AMD support for the same price!
This wouldn't even be good for reviews, like someone else posted about earlier. Think about what the AMD must now go through besides just an ordinary socket. Hell, even if you made the ordinary 6 inches tall it would probably be faster than this solution!
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
A few years ago I built half a dozen computers based around the ECS K7S5A motherboard, and they all performed (and still are performing) flawlessly. In fact, it was my early success with the K7S5A that led me to try a few other ECS motherboards, mostly with disastrous results. I don't recommend ECS motherboards in general, but in the past I have suggested the K7S5A board to lots of people that were building an AMD system on a tight budget.
The only problem I experienced with the K7S5A was the incredibly tight AGP socket. You couldn't correctly seat the graphics card unless you set the case on it's side and pushed with both hands. I was always afraid that I was about to crack the motherboard... But once you got that sucker in there, everything was fine.
I had 4 or 5 people e-mail me from a discussion forum about the K7S5A. Seems they would boot the machine, hear 8 beeps, and then nothing. (blank screen, no disk activity) The problem was that the AGP card wasn't seated properly. I'd tell them to lay the machine on it's side and really push, and they'd write back saying that they were sure it was already in correctly. But lo and behold, when they actually tried my method, the card dropped another 1/4 inch, and then the system would boot!
The really bad part was that you could insert the card normally and be able to tighten the screw on the back of the card until everything looks just fine, yet the card would still be too high in the socket and the system wouldn't boot. You had to lay it over and really push, and then you'd feel it go "thunk" as it dropped into place.
Back on topic though - I agree that the whole idea of supporting two different CPU's on the same motherboard seems to be aimed at the retailers, not the do-it-yourselfers. I would expect performance to suffer when running one or the other processor. (Try to tweak it in favor of Intel and AMD performance suffers, and vice versa...) A good compromise means they both run slow!
Why not take this one step further and have the "motherboard" be a bus backplane with your I/O ports and slots, and the daughterboards housing a CPU+RAM. Add in some NUMA and a VM achitecture and you could have an interesting system, kind of like a real computer.