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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.
I do wonder who is actually gonna buy this board in place of their usual favorite
I suspect this isn't aimed at DIY types. Instead, it lets manufacturers and stores offer a range of configurations in both AMD and Intel without having to create two separate PC lines and without having to increase their inventory.
I don't know about the rest, but my experiences with ECS boards (K7S5A mainly, a hidden gem) have been very positive. Nice prices aswell; if they price this one right it could sell like hotcakes among OEM sellers.
For the rest (end users who build their own systems), it's a fix to a problem that doesn't really exists.
Here, wait while I change CPU's... okay, that's better.
With the AMD, this would have been mod'ed -1, but with the Intel, it's only -0.9999999998.
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.
OEMs have plenty of reason to like this board. Now you can offer both AMD and Intel systems and don't have to bother about buying separate motherboards in bulk for both - with separate support.
That's a decieving blurb. I was pretty excited at first. Bad slashdot =)
That's two motherboards, not a board and a processor daughtercard. Reminds me of Apple with the "DOS Compatibility Card". If pretty much EVERYTHING I need for AMD64 is on the "daughtercard" it's a motherboard in itself. Not to mention that the article doesn't say whether or not that card is a buy-in add-on, which it probably is.
So, you'll shell out X for the Intel board, and X for the AMD sub/conversion/daughter-board.
I can see how it's cool technology, but who's gonna adapt this? And how hard would it have been to intergrate and TRULY have one board?
Blacker than my baby girl's stare. Black like the veil that the muslimina wear. Black like the planet that they fear...
Really? The AMD CPU sits out on a large seperate daughter-board. With a selection of daughter boards, you could probably plug a Z80 into this thing -- but only the Intel chip is going to be "native".
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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.
The problem is that by the time you'd want to upgrade your processor and want to have the choice between AMD and Intel, both will have changed their socket designs and u'd need a new mobo anyway.
The following statement is true
The preceding statement is false
It would be a waste of engineering time and money. The effort needed to make the thing work would not be worth it, IF they could get it to work reliably and fast enoguh.
Apparently being a PhD doesn't imply being able to RTFA. Pin-compatble? Not. Read the damn article. Hell, screw the article - READ THE /. SUMMARY, at least.
Obsolete architecture? No. Clearly not. Look up the meaning of the word 'obsolete.' Being a so-so architecture with a convoluted design (if you had to write a software opcode decoder for anything > 8086, you know what I am talking about) doesn't imply obsoleteness. Register spilling? What ISA, exactly, are you complaining about anyways - 8086? 80286? IA-32? IA-32 >= 80486? IA-32 >= Pentium? IA-32 >= Pentium Pro? x86-64?
You conmplain about the boot process.... likely about the non-integral 8086 compatibility mode found in all consumer IA-32 and x86-64 processors. I hope that a smart cookie like you can figure out that the existence of such support is purely market driven? You _do_ realize that Intel manufactures _purely_ 32-bit IA-32 processors, for embedded, industrial and military purposes, that do not support the 8086 ISA?
And another question. Are you complaining for the sake of complaining? Because I can tell you that from an average-joe, or even HLL programmer perspective, the ISA isn't particularly important, assuming you stick to good programming practices. (Yes, I am looking at you, morons who whine "SIGBUS" after running their broken code on a Sparc).
You're a PhD at freakin' Stanford. You tell me. Does there exist a motherboard and a matching set of different CPUs with the same pinouts? Wait, this is obvious. Of course not. You realize that the pin differences aren't due to some PHB thinking that having 123123 pins is better than 4242424? If someone DID come up with such a compatibility layer... say... allowing a PowerPC (with whatever bus), to operate on say... the Athlon/AlphaEV6 EV6 bus... then the performance overhead would be heinous.
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?
Great idea! We can dedicate chips to graphics coprocessing, sound tasks, network relating things, input/output. I hope they build this soon!
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!
What the parent says. It's a nice idea, but it's probably not worth implementing. Just how is an operating system supposed to know which task should be executed on which CPU? Should processed have a "heavy FPU dependency" or "integer madness" flag? Should it do some nifty statistics?
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.
>why didn't they just cut the MB in half and support the Intel proc the same way they do the AMD one?
Ah yes, the King Solomon solution!
I thought Intel and AMD were compatible? You need separate boards for them? Suddenly, the screams of "Macs use proprietary hardware" make less sense.
"Integer Madness" That's going into my vocabulary. Not sure when I'd use it, but...
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