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Ask Slashdot: Finding Quad Pentium II Motherboards?
Another member of Clan Anonymous Coward writes in with this
question:
"I have been looking for a quad pII board but have yet to
actually find one. If you know where I can find one, send
me an email to wakko@animx.eu.org. Please send all 'pII's
sucks amd rocks' messages to /dev/null."
Intel sells server and workstation motherboards that accept Xeon processors. I think only the server 'boards will accept four processors. (The main motherboard page is here.)
At least not unless I could rig up a jumper or something for a dual bios...
...
remember [ x86 assembly != alpha assembly ] = IOTTMCO
I had thoughts of I dual processor alpha box but I had to give them up...
[offtopic]
Why does everyone use the same subject long after we've strayed form it??
(no text)
o AMD K6-3 /etc
o AMD K7
o Intel PII
o Intel PIII
o DEC Alpha
o UltraSPARC
o MIPS
o StrongARM
o Malda sucks / polls suck
P2's can only go 2-way. Period. However, Xeons can go up to 8-way with the 450NX chipset... which isnt out yet.
So right now, yer stuck with dual procs unless you want to go back to the PPro
The AMI Goliath motherboard was a 4-way PPro design availible on the open market. I can't remember if it used the 450GX (Orion) chipset or an AMI proprietary design.
For those truely interested, some shop has been selling them mounted in a rackmount case on eBay. They have a somewhat inflated perception of what they are worth, however.
- ken@xrcg.com
8-way K7's with 8MB of L2 Cache each.
The 440FX could run a PII up to 300MHz with a BIOS modification. There where a few early PII motherboards that did that.
I never saw a board with both Slot 1 and Socket 8, though I've seen a slot 1 daughtercard with a Socket 8 on it.
- ken@xrcg.com
Look ate the specs for its APIC local bus. It supports more CPUs that would fit in your box (I think it's 15 in a single bus, but I do not remember the maximum # of buses)
I don't know how valid this info is but I've heard OpenPIC doesn't require CPU support the K6, K6-2, and K6-3 can be setup for SMP in the chipset with OpenPIC, and in an email to some one AMD did say its possible but its up to the chipsets to support it. Personly I think its just marketing and how some people view it, that is stopping any investment in support for it.
Poseidon, a former maker of Intel chipsets, is developing a "simultaneous switched-matrix" chipset to connect up to eight of AMD's forthcoming K7 processors. The chipset, which is expected to reach the market later this year, would allow AMD to take on archrival Intel Corp. in the server market.
9 0315S0009
http://www.techweb.com/se/directlink.cgi?EBN199
If what he said is true, he has a quad xeon, not a quad PII. ;)
Because Intel stuff is cheap. Other hardware costs about 5-10 times as much for the same performance.
>Kudos for realizing that one shouldn't run IDE on a dual system.
Can someone clue me into why you shouldn't use IDE with SMP? Although I'm not sure if my FastTrak card counts as IDE or SCSI since it acts like a SCSI card.
You sound like someone who would know so....
Have you seen the Celeron get rigged to work on a dual P2 mother board?
Do you think its possible for a P2 to be rigged to work on a quad Xeon motherboard?
Even if you cant find another 266 CPU - you could just buy a pair of 333's probably for less than you paid originally for the single 266. I think I have seen the OEM 333 PII CPU for something like $150 these days. Another advantage - the 333 puts out less heat than the original 266. You might want to get it quick though - I bet even the 333's are on their way out
PPC ???
( Really good... just need to find a generic pci ppc mobo with no apple crap...)
Amiga Magic Monster Mystery Chip ???
( Yeah right)
Sony Playstation 2 running linux ???
( could be cool)
Z80 ???
( grin )
super-parallel PIC architecture ???
(chortle)
This is getting confusing...
Does intel refer to it as a p2-xeon, or just xeon?
Actually the K6-X processors have the ability and are compatible with a multiprocessor standard (I forgot the name of name), and the only thing keeping it from being used this way is the chipsets. I don't know for sure but I heard from someone with a better technical understanding who emailed AMD and a mother board manufacturers about it, as far as I know only AMD responded saying that it is possible.
If memory serves AMD chips do support SMP, but they use what is called openPIC instead of the intel APIC standard for SMP operation. I guess the VIA mvp chipset has support for openPIC action. But no one is making a duel board because it is not profitable.
Umm.. then I guess the dual PPGA/slot-1 adapted celeron box in front of me is a figment of my imagination. A pretty fast one tho. :)
My point exactly: you are not in Cyrix or IDT's target market. They are trying to drive down the cost of PCs, and doing a very good job of it. If they can make money selling chips for the prices that they do, then more power to them. Intel is more or less openly trying to drive prices up and make people want to buy faster PCs (for instance, the Pentium-II-optimized web page campaign). I'm not sure about AMD, they seem to be driving prices downwards.
So yeah, Cyrix and IDT's chips are slower, but as far as price/performance goes, they are great for low-end PCs.
The K6-3 with its integrated L2 cache would be a great SMP chip? How?
Wouldn't having two levels of cache to keep consistent make cache coherency even harder to maintain on the K6-3 than on the K6-2? Granted, the PPro and PII do it, but SMP was a design objective in those cases, and has support from the CPU.
no text
www.kryotech.com
check it out, 450mHz k6's for all you bitheads who can't stand intel. not to mention the fact that you can keep your beer cold, and within arm's reach at all time.
If the AMD's SMP isn't the same as Intel's SMP will systems that now support SMP need support for AMD's SMP or are they compatible compatible? (i.e. FreeBSD, BeOS, Solaris, NT)
-> dox@(removethis)pezdispenser.net
I would like to add some comments on what you say about PowerPC CPUs.
The 603 is not well suited for SMP systems because of its cache coherency model, which is 3-state (MEI).
The 604 uses the MESI model, which adds the "Shared" state, allowing more efficient SMP.
It has nothing to do with instructions.
The 750 (G3) uses a refined 603 core, and still uses MEI.
The "G4" is *not* based on the 604 core. You can see it as a combination of a G3 core with a 604 FPU. It combines the integer performance of the 750 with the FPU performance of the 604.
Concerning SMP, the G4 uses a 5-state cache coherency protocol (MERSI, where R stands for "Reserved"). It supports a large fast backside L2 cache, and allows direct cache-to-cache communications between processors.
In short: it will be a great SMP chip.
The G4 is not a 64-bit CPU. You're talking about its data bus width. The first chips will use a G3 compatible bus to make it easier for systems developpers. But a new wider and faster bus (MaxBus) will appear later.
In the original IBM/Motorola roadmap, G1 meant the first-generation 601, G2 meant the 603 and 604, and G3 meant the 740/750.
So you change generation when you have major changes in the architecture.
Then Apple started calling the PPC750 (Arthur) the "G3", and when rumors appear about "Max", the next PowerPC by Motorola, everybody calls it "G4".
But Max is more like Arthur's big brother. It has major improvements over the 750 (FPU, AltiVec, SMP, larger caches) but it still feels like 3rd-generation.
So the G4 rumors from the IBM side do not concern the same chips. It's likely IBM doesn't want to put AltiVec on these because of the die space. Multiple PowerPC cores on a chip will be really interesting.
How many cores can they fit on the chip? Will each core have a dedicated L2 cache, or will all cores share a big one? Will the L2 cache(s) be on-chip too ? Multiple off-chip L2 caches would need lots of pins!
Cyrix MII-300 is $27 on Pricewatch, and MII-333 is $33 on Pricewatch. That impresses me. The Cyrix chips are for a completely different market (low cost) than SMP systems (power user, server), when you think about it for a minute.
IIRC, this was the original PPro chipset and was also capable of having a (early) P2 run on it (Look back, there were mobos made that had, IIRC, 440FX and both a Slot 1 and Socket 8).
I do not agree. I know a lot of UNIX-heads, especially the old guard who were around when IDE really blew chunks, ardently believe in SCSI only. However, I feel that if you're building an affordable dual-Celeron linux box that is not in a heavy-duty commercial environment, it makes little sense to waste a lot of money on SCSI disks.
/usr/local and /home. The drives are mirrored, all on separate controllers, using Linux software RAID-1. One of the mirrored IDE drives is on a Promise Ultra-33; the other on the motherboard controller. The system supports 50+ concurrent logins constantly and is used for everything from chatting to heavy C development, and I doubt the performance difference with UW SCSI data drives would be noticeable in the slightest.
I just built a large multiuser dual-Celeron with slightly older 1GB SCSI drives for the system disks, and UDMA drives for
Admittedly the UDMA drives (which are IBM Deskstar 8's) do not perform as well as much more expensive new SCSI drives would, but the difference is hardly noticeable on a box that constantly has 150-200MB of real RAM free to buffer the disks -- and extra RAM is far cheaper than new, 7200RPM+ SCSI hard drives and controllers.
Finally, check www.storagereview.com and compare
modern IDE disks to modern SCSI disks -- there's still a difference, but it's not very big, and IDE is *MUCH* cheaper. Admittedly on a large networked business-critical database server or something like that you'd want to go SCSI, but not for something you're going to run out of your home, for multiuser interactive use, or even as a web server, IMHO.
Until you get to the point where a hardware RAID array is worth considering, SCSI is a waste of money for most Linux servers.
Trey Palmer trey at fsckoff dot net
PIII cannot go >2-way either. Only PPRO, P2-Xeon, and PIII-Xeon can. I believe the P2 only has two bus agent signal lines on it, BF0 and BF1, so only 2-way setups are possible.
OpenPIC, as I understand, has no CPU support, and therefore the chipset is much harder to make. Basically saying "we support OpenPIC" is just a way to pretend that you care about SMP.
PVM itself is a library and a control program (pvmd) for sending messages between processes which don't have to be on the same machine (although it does work well in a SMP environment). As such you can't just take a program, without sources, and pvm it. However if you write a program which exec's a program AND you have a large range searching problem (i.e. a big data base search or something similar) where you have segmented the data base so that each process can search a unique segment then (at least in theory) you can call up multiple copies of the database program with one for each segment. This would give you close to the maximum theoretical improvement in speed. (you still need to merge the results) A similar trick works for image rendering if you can specify an image sub-space to render.
A good example of a pvm problem is from GE where it was/is used to calculate the finite elements for predicting fields in transfromers and
the like. You have to do quite a lot of calculation for each element and you want to evaluate several million elements. This would take literally cray-years on the scale they do. However, they can take over several hundred workstations and get it done in a weekend. There are, of course, all sorts of sceduling problems (you don't want to shut down the network by flooding it with startup messages) and you need to be able to detect when a workstation or network crashes.
If you're doing IO intensive stuff like a file server or serving static web pages, it won't benefit you too much - the hard drives or network interface would be more of a bottleneck.
But if you're doing something that has multiple processes that are CPU-bound, like a compile server, it makes a huge difference! It would certainly help in my situation where I want to burn a CD, run an FTP server, and play Quake at the same time - while someone else logs in via an X terminal to run Word Perfect.
Mark
There seems to be confusion about AMD and SMP. The K6 chips (at least the early ones) do support SMP -- just not Intel's Advanced-PIC (APIC) architecture. Since Intel is the only chipset maker who has made SMP chipsets (and their chipsets naturally support only Intel's proprietary APIC architecture), K6 chips haven't worked in SMP configurations.
Unfortunately, no chipset maker ever came forward with a chipset which will work with the OPIC (OpenPIC) architecutre in AMD K6 and Cyrix chips. According to most of them, there was just no demand for K6 SMP. K7 doesn't use Intel's APIC either, but (this is my understanding) AMD has finally come up with their own designs for an OPIC chipset for K7 and have forwarded such help to chipset makers so that the SMP hardware on the K7 will hopefully be supported.
I have 2 Compaq Proliant 6000's with quad PII processors, and 1 gig ram each. Sadly, they run NT.
I had the same problem with mine. I origionaly bought one PII 300 about a year ago then just when I had the cash and the need for #2 #$@%$ Intel went and discontinued the PII 300. So instead I bought a couple socket 370 celeron 300A's and a couple MSI slockets. Some solder fumes later I'm running dual celerons at 450 each for less than one PII 300 cost before they were discontiued. It turned out well in this case although if celerons weren't SMPable (at least not easily as with the slot 1 celery) I would have had to spend about 4x as much to get SMP with similar performance. So if you spend the money up front and fill the slots you can save money.
Now I just need to figure out what to do with the PII 300 I have hanging around now. (It's a SL2W8 chip too... oh well)
Try more like $600-$800 I believe you're only going to find quad cpu boards in the full AT form nad the cases that fit this are definitely not cheap. I'm also assuming you will want things like... well... about 20 fans for the insane heat generation and redundant 600watt ps for the 200 watts of processors not to mention the power drawn by just the fans to cool the monster, HDDs etc. Definitly not cheap. I fugure it's mor like 8k-12k minimum for a quad Intel system. You cna get on heck of a computer from SGI or Sun for that ammount. Now if I could only get you to send me the money you would save by doing that...
It also helps if you know what your looking for, for example, don't give a damn about MP3 benchmarking if you don't use MP3s, don't give a damn about kernel compiling if I don't do it often. :)
If you play games, bench mark or find bench marks of the kind of games you play.
Any way, benchmarking one thing doesn't mean a processor is better in everything, it helps to know what kind of applications a processor excels at, and then look at the price, to get an idea of the price to performance ratio, and if you feel strong about something look at the ethics of it, all before you decide to buy.
That only makes sense from a market standpoint. ALL of those chips use the same base CPU core as the PPro, and IIRC early P2 boards used the same board chipset as the PPro (I've seen boards that have both a Slot 1 and a Socket 8 and will take either one). I think this is just intel artificially creating low-end and high-end (or maybe just workstation/server) markets.
There isn't such thing as a quad PII. There is a Quad Xenon.. goto www.tyan.com
There are no quad PII motherboards because the PII can only handle two cpu's.
I'm already running into this problem with my dual-capable P2-266. I bought it with a single processor, but now that I'm thinking of adding a second, I'm having to hunt for just the right twin/match.
You don't really need the same exact processor. I have two different P2/266's (SL2HC and SL2HE), one has ECC, one does not.. they still work fine. I have even heard of people mixing P2/300's (the 2.0v variety - SL2W8/SL2YK) with Celeron 300's or 300A's, and it working just fine.
http://www.penguincomputing.com/quad-xeon-scsi.cgi
your a total dullard if you spend the money for a overpriced motherboard, and 4 WAY WAY overpriced CPU's. Try dual Alpha's! (do they make quad alpha's?) If they do try that! Xeon's are cool and all but the price is insane, much less for four of them!
i'm installing linux (redhat 5.2) on a pentiumII 350 and its running really slow...we tried it on two differnt 350's one a Dell Dimension and the other a home built...its running really slow in X and its hard to tell if its running slow in console mode cause i don't run anything big in console...its running slower then my 166+ at home....anyone else have this problem? any suggestions? i'd appreciate any help i can get...thanks
finally someone else to agree with. :)
The SGI Visual Workstation 540 supports quad PII or PIII chips... you'd have to write drivers for Cobalt and IVC to get it to run Linux, though...
Bitslice
Custom architecture in FPGA
Most of the PII motherboards you find will be 2 way. Intel built the chips with two way in mind. They are designed with most fo the logic needed for 2 way on chip. Four way requires very special chipset support which is expensive to product.
I am using WinNT and Dual PII-266(533 total) and see a drastic performance increase. Any benchmark
that is multi-threaded or uses the OS or other will run double the speed. Most benchmarks that can take advantage of SMP(aka. threaded benchmarks), run double. Comparing disk or other
low level benchmarks show my machine running at a little over 500mhz when compared to my friend 450(100FSB to his adv.).
I admit the downside is with games like quake and the OS (No Directx over 3.0), but who cares when I
can have other things crunching away(burning a CDR) and play quake at the same time!!!! Think about it +$30 for Dual MB and Cpu.
Linux hasn't been an option until recently, since the OS didn't have Kernal level threading, so applications scale to CPUs, but the OS doesn't.
L8r
Now that would be a nice mother. Multiple AMD procecssors would rock the house and not cost much, either.
Alas, the Super7 era is almost over. Welcome, K7.
BTW, who all here is planning on buying a K7 system?
----------
"They misunderestimated me." --George W Bush, Nov. 6, 2000
varesearch has 'em.
bit expensive tho.
Synergies are basically awesome, and they're even better when you leverage them. -PA
in 4-way configurations, that is. AMD's offering suck even more. The cache is too small and slow. For 4-way SMP you really need a Xeon, but noboby can afford even one of those babies. Tell you the truth, I don't even know if 4-way SMP is possible with the P2, but even if is, you shouldn't get one. Sorry.
Yes! I have seen them and have played w/ them. Back in 96-97 they had an 8 way motherboard, cept it was like $8k w/ case, mb, cpu and cache
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
Before I get flamed.. I'm definatly not awake yet.. That was the PPro I was thinking about!
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
I don't think it is possible to use the celerons in a dual configuration. I'm sure that intel has some connection in the chip that they can cut to make the celeron un smp-able. If people could run the celerons in dual mode, who would buy a regular pentium II. They have everyone shoehorned into exactly the market they want. Anyone know when I can get my hands on a motorola motherboard and chips, that are cheap and not apple affiliated.
(comment on my spelling and I'll kick you in the teeeth.)
josh
Okay, here's the deal for the QUAD CPU do-it your-selfer. You can get the Intel SC450NX
chassis which includes a big chassis with a Quad CPU motherboard, built-in video, UW2 SCSI
controller, 3 hot-swap 400W power supplies and a whole bunch of fans (11 to be exact). The
chassis can purchased for $3999 from http://www.acmemicro.com/price1.htm. You'll
still need to add CPU's (about $700 each for the
400MHz/512K cache variety) and disk(s). So you're
talking about $8000 for your basic system. Personally, I would go for 4 nicely equipped dual
CPU PII systems instead which would cost about the same.
And even more important for some applications: :)
The communication link between two computers is _way_ slower than the communication between two CPU:s on a dual board. You could of course use gigabit ethernet, but you can buy a dual PII for the price of one gigabit ethernet card..
/Andreas
If you want that much power, you dont want an Intel process.. grab a Sun Ultra 2, with dual UltraSparc-II 300mhz processors. That alone will kill any combination of pentium processors out there today. Then throw in Creator 3D graphics and you got your self a killer system
My understanding was that the PentiumII couldn't do more than 2-way SMP, due to a design decision by Intel. That was why Pentium Pros are still used. The Xeon processors can do 4-way and above, and those are the ones used by VA Research.
Posted by mhamblin:
:)
:)
I have to post... literally just got SMP working on this quad-Pentium!
The best way I know to find hardware is to know people unless you want to pay a lot of money. The best way to know the right ppl is to start a Linux User Group at your local University, either that or become President. Then after you become the Linux "expert" for the whole University, you are in a good position to meet people who are willing to make trades on hardware. Hold a hardware swap, you'll be amazed at what turns up. Maybe it's crazy, but it's a ton better than that 486DX4 120 I've been using for a couple years now
Posted by hardwarewhore:
Pentium II's only have breq's for 2 processors, you can read about it in the intel manuals. Maybe you can modify the PII to get a couple extra breqs out of it like you can the celeron, but I doubt it.
The reason you might not want to cluster is that you have to buy (n * largest memory image you run) where n is the number of nodes. Of course, you get n-fold availability if you monitor and failover the nodes, but you pay for it.
With an SMP box, you buy your RAM for all n processors in the box. The OS and hardware had better be up to snuff if you're going to run large-scale SMP; ensuring this is not cheap either.
AFAIK the cheapest way to do 4-way SMP is with PPros. You may be able to substitute PII-Overdrive processors on a PPro mobo and drive down the price since the PII-OD is effectively a slow Xeon. But then you might have to shop for (expensive and slow) nonstandard memory.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
It's a Pentium II OD and they're around $400-500.
;-)
That's a significant savings over a Xeon...
Shortly I should be upgrading my hoary old dual PPro to them and upping the RAM to 128MB. I decided the cost of getting old memory is less than that of a new computer, and the box is a ROCK... no complaints, EVER.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
I'll be placing an order for a quad (or at least dual) PPC G4 board for my Powermac 9600 just as soon as Newer Technology announces it.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
It is also rumored that IBM will be building G4 chips with up to four G4 cores per chip. The multi core G4's won't have AltiVec, though. It should be possible to build a fairly low cost sixteen way box using those.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
and 4 machines even cheaper by much more than a quad CPU board? IMO, clustering single CPU machines is a better choice than attempting to pack a single machine with more CPUs. Besides for the same expense, you'll be able to build a bigger cluster (more total CPUs, and therefore computationally more powerful) of single CPU machines than if you attempt to build one big massive parallel machine. Maybe there's some tremendous advantage of SMP over clustering (like Beowulf) which I am not seeing. Feel free to bash me about for my ignorange.
...with a question. Is SMP capability included in the newer kernels, or do you have to compile a different /special kernel? Thanks in advance.
----------------
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
openpic doesn't need cpu support, so it would be possible to run the K6 in SMP mode, but there's no boards.
Perhaps if slashdot readers emailed Via and Acer Labs this might change.
(k6-3 with it's integrated L2 cache would be a great SMP chip).
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
So why stick with the x86 architecture? I've been running quad CPU Sparcs under Linux since 1996 or so (admittedly, SMP support was a bit ropey back then). Also, Sparc Linux happily scales to 16 CPUs, and you don't tend to run into the same "my frobnozz QX-439 chipset doesn't support more than 2 CPU" type issues.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Even disregarding the technical limitations (P2 being limitted etc), your chances of finding these are low. First of all, most people interested in 4-way SMP are going to be working for companies, who don't put their own boxes together, they just buy from Dell, Compaq or whatnot. Secondly, it gets unwieldy fitting four processors into a standard form factor. I'd look carefully at what you're doing to see if you *really* need something doing 4-way SMP (refer to the previous "Is SMP worth it" AskSlashdot), few things will actually run faster on a 4 way SMP box than they would on 4 separate machines for probably half the cost.
I make no gaurentees about the above information, but it is what I understand from following AMD recently.
Loren Osborn
Loren Osborn
As far as Cirix and WinChip go, I haven't heard to many positives from them with regard to quality or speed. Therefore I would not be likely to buy Cirix or WinChip despite their low price.
Loren Osborn
Loren Osborn
Loren Osborn
Loren Osborn
would you need such a beast? No one has yet explained this to me.
:) and do SMP _beautifully_. Alpha systems are _very_ cost effective on a per-performance basis, and Sun has some new low end workstations that are also quite reasonable.
I've worked on dual pII systems, and they're nice'n'fast. A dual celeron hack is a thing of beauty. But my understanding was always that more than 2-processors was not really a speedup on Intel architecture, which has too many memory access hangups to get it right.
The exception to this _may_ be AMI, since I seem to remember them having crazy in-house designed memory config hacks that made things much more reasonable.
In any case, you are much _much_ better off with a dual-pII 450 machine than with quad ppro's -- the pII's are faster and access memory better (can you say 100mHz FSB?). Why anyone would still buy a ppro is beyond me.
If your requirements still aren't met, you need to stop the train and find another architecture. Alpha and SPARC are both civilized architectures that run civilized os's (like linux
Or we could all wait for SGI to bring out the SMP Visual Workstation, with SGI-designed memory architecture. Mmmmmmm.....visual workstations....soylent green.....
My Celeron 450a is quite reasonable.
It's the 10,500 rpm HD's that'll do ya in these days. I suggest mounting them in rails in a front accessable 5.25" slot, putting some static foam in front as a dust filter, and cooling the drives that way.
Two of my friends recently lost data to HD crashes because of heat. One was a Seagate Medallist Pro 7200rpm UDMA drive. The other was some 10krpm scsi drive. Both fine drives, but they run _very_ hot. Be careful.
Oh, and you left out the DragonBall and the ColdFire, which even though technically are microcontrollers, can still run Linux. And, some of us may still be planning on buying low-end chips (like Sparcs, 80486's, P5's, 680x0's) until the day they pry out abused checkbooks from our cold dead fingers. Old Sun hardware rocks. 486's, well, not so much. And there's just a classic feel to the warm monochrome glow of a Sun 3/50 that fills me with joy.
Leapfrog
This is correct. The workstation m-boards only support 2 Xeon's, but do throw in an AGP slot. The server allows four, more memory capacity (8 SIMMS or something like that), and no AGP.
I think 4 processors would be overkill in anything but a server situation, and then only if you doing database stuff. Or generating Slashdot pages on the fly for the masses...
Er, price/performance? Then again, I suppose if you're looking for 4way SMP then you're in a different class.. The Ultra Enterprise 450 OEM board (AXi? or is that the U10+SCSI?) is a good foundation for a quad proc system. I actually kinda like Integrix's RAIDs, and they sell a cloner E450. As does Tatung and a large number of others. Don't buy Sun unless you have a nice discount with them or are into lots of $$$ pain.
If you really want to cook lotsa keys, drop 4 400MHZ Ultra2s in that pup and wire it into a hardware RAID (very little sucks ass more than software RAID).. Swizaeet..
because, by definition, an OS must have incorporated LVM and JFS to be considered civilized. And you must be able to boot off an LVM/JFS disk.
;)
(Being able to chdev -l sys0 would be nice too
IIRC, that was one of the selling points for K7 systems. And the K6 (the entire line) does have SMP built in, but no chipsets support K6 SMP, as there really isn't much of a market. Usually, SMP is only for either graphics work or work as a server, and the K6 has horrible FPU perfromance comparted to a Intel chip at the same clock speed, and the K6 would only be used in a low-end webserver without SMP.
Tim
Elbrus 2000 :)
So what else besides clock speed do you need to match? I was thinking of doing the same thing for my next computer.
Steve
Read the specs at:e rver/sc450nx/procsupp.htm
http://support.intel.com/support/motherboards/s
pronoblem
The APIC bus specs is one thing, what the CPU implements is another. The PIIs only support 2-way SMP. Electrically they can only drive 2-way buses, so even if they could support more in their APIC support, they don't. That's like the UW-SCSI chips which support 16-node setups but can only drive 8.
The Celerons are P2s in their core and have the same SMP support. Intel just did not provide the required control pins on the Celerons (and these can be used with the SMP adapters). Therefore, if I'm not wrong, Celerons also support only 2-way SMP just as a P2.
Probably, if the P2 would support more than 2-way in their chips you could probably connect more. But they can't electrically drive a SMP bus with more than 2 nodes, so operation would be either unreliable or unusable.
thx
:)
... and missing.
like it will matter, I can hardly afford my palm IIIx
---------------------------------------
The art of flying is throwing yourself at the ground...
I've been drooling about quad processor 'puters for a while now and I got a question.
... and missing.
I've had a dual ppro for a while now (tiz only a dual board, so lets just assume its a quad for my question). Could I slap a third chip in for a total of 3 processors or does it have to be 4?
Edukate me fellow geeks!
---------------------------------------
The art of flying is throwing yourself at the ground...
I had a dual ppro 233 box (oc'd 180s) and all I had to do was buy 2 good cpu coolers and fill the spots in the case for fans with fans.
:)
... and missing.
pumped out a good bit of heat, but I didnt need to supercool anything. Made a kick ass web server/quake2 server too
---------------------------------------
The art of flying is throwing yourself at the ground...
It is possible. I am on one now.
It's not a good idea to say something is not possible just cause you have not heard of such a thing. That's called ignornace and M$ism.
Cheers
--
It's true that multiple CPU + SCSI tends to generate more heat than single CPU + UDMA. There is one solution for that though ... it's called a fan. But adding 10 fans inside an almost airtight box WILL NOT HELP! What you really want to do is open a "window" (sorry) in your case so that air can get in or out!!
.. made a circular hole the size of a dead power supply fan .. and stuck a fan in there. Temperature has now dropped to a constant 31.5 degrees despite now running at 392Mhz (112Mhz bus)!! Note also that extracting the hot air on top of the CPUs seems more efficient than blowing fresh air on them.
I can give my nachine as an example. It was a dual PII 350 and the motherboard was showing 41 degrees celsius before modification. Then I took my jigsaw
All this to say that HEAT is not a real issue unless you try to overclock a P90 to 600! The main problem is that standart PC cases have really bad air circulation so your fans end up moving a lot of hot air around wich is much less cooling than getting the heat out of the box.
that was my 2 cents.
Shared storage is an issue. We bought a Netapp for that... that of course isn't within everyone's budget, nor am I completely happy with it (Short answer - a Netapp is nifty, and mostly functional. Mostly functional is Ok for something that costs 1/10th of the price. Hell, maybe I'm doing something wrong.). For most web related things, carbon-copy machines are fine until you get to the Yahoo range of traffic. But if you're that bleeding edge, you have tons of consultants telling you what to do with your servers, and thus different problems.
I forget what 8 was for.
Kriston J. Rehberg
http://kriston.net/
Kriston
Thats really unbeatable MIPS for the buck ratio.
Fionn
you might as well read the posts before it as well, i.e. normal pII's don't support 4-way, only single and dual. But Xeons are very nice.. mmm. i'd normally say get some AMD action, but currently the K6 line doesn't support SMP at all. (hopefull k7 will)
-- adraken
most of the time? yes :P :-)
SMP is cheaper, but is somewhat more of
a hassle, and it means that you keep this
room FREEZING so your computers don't overheat.
:P
The 2.2 kernel supports SMP with a simple configuration switch. The 2.0 kernel has some very primitive SMP support, and you have to specially compile for it.
If you wanna put together an SMP box, be carefull. Either buy a complete system, or be very carefull as to the chassis you select. I'm waiting for another chassis to arrive because when I put everything together, the internal 3.5" disk bay was sitting right on top of the SDRAM DIMMS. Ouch.
Is there any way just to take a standard multi-threaded program like, say, an oracle server, and run it on a cluster without recompiling the oracle stuff to use PVM or whatever other library?
lemme know...i'm quite interested, but not so informed (yet).
-Doviende
"The value of a man resides in what he gives,
and not in what he is capable of receiving."
--Albert Einstein
It's also recommended that you match the stepping and the batch if possible. Basically you want the chips to be as close to identical as possible. That's normally why it's better to buy the chips all at the same time.
-matt
PII does come in the 4-way flavor, I don't know where Dell got them but they introduced a rather new server with 4 PII's in parallel. Can you buy these motherboards? I have no idea. Thhe servers themselves come in very large racks with the mobos on shelves for easy access. I want one.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
As an addendum the server is the PowerEdge 6300 by dell. It uses a quad processor design that can support up to 4 Xeons per shelf. I would suppose you could do a lil hotwiring and get it to accept a regular PII.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Here's the URL for a comparison of Intel's chipsets.
c ard.htm
http://developer.intel.com/design/chipsets/line
AMI Dual and Quad boards
-Master Switch, one more element in the machine
I looked at VAResearch. They have quad
P-III Xeon and quad Xeon machines, but no
quad P-II machines. I think the other posters
are correct: there ARE no quad-P-II boards.
Skinka needs to get a clue, before he sides with Intels offering he should look at whats out there.
Ok. Lets look at what is out there. See any K7's? - I bet not. I know all about the K7 and am a big fan of it. I also know the that there aren't any in stores, in fact, AMD said just yesterday that the K7 will ship late. Whatever AMD will do in the future don't mean squat if you need a fast system now.
No...the K7 will use its own interface, named slot A. This is not rumor, it is fact. AMD has been demonstrating some alpha K7s for a while now. Slot A has the same dimensions as slot 1, this was done to make it easier for motherboard manufacturers making slot 1 boards to transition to slot A boards. But slot A is not slot 1, or slot 2. It uses the Alpha's EV-6 bus. By the way, although the 21164 Alpha is a socket based chip, the 21264 uses the exact same slot A interface as the K7. Off topic, I know, but uhh... does this mean that if I were to have say, a K7, and decide I wanted something else, that I could just yank out the CPU and drop in an Alpha? Ohh baby.. that'd be sweet... K7 looks to be a pretty cool cip, I think... And if it is similar to an Alpha, well, I have that much more repsect for it. Ok, enough babbling from me. Darmox
If I was that drunk, I would have remembered it -- H. Simpson
hmmm i imagine that makes my quad PII xeon compaq server useless huh??
End Transmission....
I use a dual 450 box and it has always run perfectly, once the initial bugs from the pre 2.0.35 SMP were worked out. With 2.2 it screams. It blows slightly warm air out the back, but is no worse than my P90. I find that most PIIs run cooler than many versions of the classic pentium, due to 5.5v vs 2.2 and other such details.
About 5 years ago, I went to a "supercomputer" conference (quite impressive, actually, Intel brought along 2 Paragon Deltas, SGI had a bunch of Onyxes and better...)
At this conference IBM had a few "toys." One of which was a PowerPC *notebook*. This is before Apple had even released a single PPC Mac, and the only PPCs were IBM workstations. This notebook was running a PPC version of OS/2 2.1. The IBM guy said it was great, and that unfortunately, the OS wasn't ready for prime time yet, as x86 emulation wasn't very good (for running Windows programs.)
So, IBM did port OS/2 to PowerPC, but for some reason, they never released it. I was a little disappointed, as PPCs looked great, and I was running (and VERY happy with) OS/2 for a few years then (and a few years after.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
About 5 years ago, I went to a "supercomputer" conference (quite impressive, actually, Intel brought along 2 Paragon Deltas, SGI had a bunch of Onyxes and better...)
At this conference IBM had a few "toys." One of which was a PowerPC *notebook*. This is before Apple had even released a single PPC Mac, and the only PPCs were IBM workstations. This notebook was running a PPC version of OS/2 2.1. The IBM guy said it was great, and that unfortunately, the OS wasn't ready for prime time yet, as x86 emulation wasn't very good (for running Windows programs.)
So, IBM did port OS/2 to PowerPC, but for some reason, they never released it. I was a little disappointed, as PPCs looked great, and I was running (and VERY happy with) OS/2 for a few years then (and a few years after.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Thanx for all your comments. One person wanted to know why I'd want it. Basically, the way things go these days, the fastest pII is less than entry level the next year. I figured that getting more horse power would last for a while and to keep from the yearly upgrading.
.g.)
I already bought a dual pII board with 2 450's. I love it.. Compile kernels and play quake2. Pretty nice to compile the kernel in just under 3 minutes using make -j 4 (don't ask
Lab test show that use of micro$oft causes deadly cancer in lab animals.
Hmm...
Are you going to try and make a dual 400 (o'c to 600) Celeron?
That I'd like to see...
BTW, what type of motherboard (and chipset) is this?
Kudos for realizing that one shouldn't run IDE on a dual system.
--Al
I remember when the !@#$ mobo's were $2500 w/ no CPU's.
Even if you do by and populate one. 70pin ECC memory is high!!!
Better to build a dual Celeron 400 and smile.
If you do decide to do this, 200x256 will give you better performance than 200x512. Don't ask why.
I remember reading this in a NetPower (now defunct) review like 3 years ago.
Hope this helps.
--Al
--Al
With SMP systems, in addition to clock speed, you also need to match cache size...
:^P
I.e. 512k n.e. 1024k, etc. etc. even if you are using Forth....
Good luck!
--Al
You bet I am. The very first day they come out, my order is in with Ingram. Unless I can get a dual or quad mainboard later on, in which case I'm holding out until then.
Imagine having an dual or quad K7 Linux machine. Not one Intel chip, not one line of MS code. For cheap. That's a very nice thought.
Do the poll, Rob.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Pentium II sucks in 4-way configurations, that is. AMD's offering suck even more.
AMD's quad CPU offerings would suck. Because they don't offer it. There aren't any AMD processors that can do SMP because Intel holds the necessary instructions pretty close to the vest.
However, the original poster was all wet and showed a significant lack of understanding. Send it to /dev/null my ass. I have Red Hat 5.2 running on an AMD K6-2/300 and on a Pentium II 300. You want to talk BogoMIPS? 599.65 for the AMD, 348.16 for the PII. Same amount of RAM, same HDD, same pretty much everything (except mainboards and CPUs).
Pricewatch say that the PII/300 costs $148. It also says a K6-2/300 costs $49. So there's a three-to-one ratio there. What would you rather have as a quad machine?
Even if the AMD supported SMP and even if the K6-2 had half the BogoMIPS, I'd still get an AMD quad machine. And I've read that the K6-3/450 will outperform a PIII/500 for some things. No cache. Right. How about a meg of L3 cache? Per CPU. At half the cost of a PentiumIII.
I can't wait for the K7.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Bare in mind that if you don't buy the multi-proc with a full complement of processors, it could be that much harder for you to fill the empty slots further down the line.
I'm already running into this problem with my dual-capable P2-266. I bought it with a single processor, but now that I'm thinking of adding a second, I'm having to hunt for just the right twin/match.
--The more you know, the less you know.
The catch with using IDE and a dual system compared to SCSI is that the dual system will be slowed down by the (normally) slower access and throughput rates of an IDE harddrive. By using SCSI you will have faster access rates and throughput that will vastly improve the performance of the system. I know this because I am running a dual ppro 180 with an UDMA 33 IDE drive attached to the M-board. I also have a cheap SCSI2 card and cartridge drive. Teh access to teh SCSI card is equivilant to the harddrive, and there is much better than SCSI2 out there.
Laugh, it's good for you!
oh yes they make quad alphas... from a server a school...
[miker@wpi.wpi.edu]~/>info
Host name: wpi.WPI.EDU
IP address: 130.215.24.6
MAC address: 00:00:f8:1a:c4:27
Operating system: Digital UNIX
Release: V4.0
Version: 878
Architecture: alpha
Platform name: AlphaServer 4X00 5/300 2MB
Number of CPUs: 4
CPU type number (/usr/include/machine/hal/cpuconf.h): 49
CPU speed: 299 MHz
Physical Memory: 512 MB
Virtual Memory: 1922 MB
Your next available alternative from using Xeons is to use PentuimPros. I forget the chipset (it's not 440FX, it's whatever's after, and it's not very popular... 440GX?) There are 4-way PPro boards out there, but since your top speed is 4x200mhz, it's yet again hardly worth it.
http://developer.intel.com should list the chipset, but good luck finding such a board on the open market.
ur not going to find a quad pentium two mother board, and if u do find one let me know.
intel didn't design the pentuim II to be used in quad config, its only single or dual, the ones that do quad is the PPro , xeon, PIII, or PIIIxeon
-------------------------------------------------
it would be interesting to see what cpus us nerds will be looking into next, can it be amd or intel, only the poll will decide!!!
-------------------------------------------------
no it has to be even chips , the same reason there has to be even number of dram chips, its to fill up the bus, when u split something their is two ends, and both have to be filled in order to work, when going with more than one processor, u r esstentially splitting the cpu bus, and it has to fill both , and split it again and u get for, again and 8 and so forth
-------------------------------------------------
You can get slot adapters from Supermicro (and Tyan?) that will let you run slot1 CPUs in a slot2 motherboard. If you can get the quad-proc motherboard, that might be a solution for you.
--Corey
Not only will they not deserve liberty or safety, Mr. Franklin, they will be DENIED both!
The page of the guy who found out that the Celerons can be manipulated to do SMP is at
http://www.kikumaru.com/ (in Japanese)
Recently an English WebBoard has been added where Duaron (=Dual Celeron) people gather.
I use a Celeron 300A x 2 machine running at 504MHz. Requires some cooling but runs great. I was one of those who drilled 0.5mm holes into the SCPP version Celeron and hotwired the whole thing with 1.5V. Was quite fun soldering a CPU.
(The new PPGA are just too easy)
The AD450NX is bigger. :) Up to 8 Gigs of RAM, 12 SCSI-2 Hot-Swap bays, 6 32-bit PCI & 5 64-bit PCI...
AD450NX link at developer.intel.com.
These are REALLY stable SMP under Linux, and I cringe at running NT under ANY processor. (plus at 500Mhz they'll do 5 to 6Mkeys/s)
der dee der.
I don't think it's so much the chipset as the BREQ pins on the CPU itself. Physically, it's missing the pins on the CPU to do more than dual processor configs. The Celerons, being P2-based, have the pin necessary, it's just running at the wrong voltage levels, thus the soldering. If I had a couple hundred bucks burning a hole in my pocket, I'd try drilling and soldering a mobo for dual Celerons, but I'm not quite gutsy enough to start adding pin-outs and circuitry to them. :)
In short, you couldn't get the extra BREQs for multiple processors without changing the entire CPU, and then you'd have to convince the Slot 1 that they were there.
First off, YOUR OFF TOPIC.
Second, you didn't give enough info to evalute the
problem...how much ram, what type of video card, etc, etc, etc....
>>Sig under construction
Seems Seagate drives have been giving the rest of the fast bunch a bad rep.
I've got a couple of 2.5gig Seagate Medalists at 5400rpm, which have always run hot enough that it's uncomfortable to place my hand on them for any length of time.
On the other hand, I've also got three IBM 9ES drives (two 9.1's, one 4.5gig) at 7200rpm. None of them ever get anywhere beyond mildly warm, even when mounted in the same places as the aforementioned Seagates, under similar ambient conditions. (by mildly warm, I mean about the same temperature that an electric blanket might be comfortable at.)
Methinks Seagate hasn't been doing many things right as of late if they can't make a fast drive which doesn't require supplemental cooling.
Kid-proof tablet..
The Proliant 6000 comes in 2 flavors: up to 4-way PPros, or up to 4-way PII/PIII Xeons, not plain-vanilla PIIs. We have about 60 of them in 2 and 4-way PPro configuration.
No...the K7 will use its own interface, named slot A. This is not rumor, it is fact. AMD has been demonstrating some alpha K7s for a while now. Slot A has the same dimensions as slot 1, this was done to make it easier for motherboard manufacturers making slot 1 boards to transition to slot A boards. But slot A is not slot 1, or slot 2. It uses the Alpha's EV-6 bus. By the way, although the 21164 Alpha is a socket based chip, the 21264 uses the exact same slot A interface as the K7.
I am not an idiot. Please use my name to email me.
"That's right, I'm quoting myself."
-Upsilon
The K6 supports no SMP configuration at all. You're thinking of the K5, which did support OPIC, but was also completely unsupported by chipset makers.
I think it was a poor design decision on AMD's part to pull OPIC from the K6 -- I suspect there would be enough user demand to get chipset folks like VIA to support it as a cost-effective alternative to P6 SMP.
I don't think it is possible to use the celerons in a dual configuration. I'm sure that intel has some connection in the chip that they can cut to make the celeron un smp-able. If people could run the celerons in dual mode, who would buy a regular pentium II. They have everyone shoehorned into exactly the market they want. Anyone know when I can get my hands on a motorola motherboard and chips, that are cheap and not apple affiliated.
(comment on my spelling and I'll kick you in the teeeth.)
josh
Where can I find a cheap quad PPro Mb at now. I have looked and the only one I found was over nine hundred dollars.(sorry don't remember where I saw it.)
I sit corrected, Is there anything special you have to do to get it up and running?
Hi, The part number you want is: MSI MS-6905. I just got two of them, but they only have an overclocking jumper on them, no SMP jumper. Have a look at: http://www.kikumaru.com/pc/s370tos1/index_e.html
Which lays it all out nicely, and you only need to solder 1 wire.
Shall let you all know how I get on with dual 366's!!
Phil
300A - not much cache but I dont have lot of green left.
I may have these gusy actually build it and my new machines, If the price is right and they are willing to use my parts, and they'll warranty the system for X amount of days.
I don't feel like another burn out.
http://www.computernerd.com/future6.html
If I actually end up chatting with them I'll ask about the 400. Thx
Yep, Yep, Yep -but only cause I try'd to run out of specs and didn't notice that it was that hot
was running asus p2b-ds - board is hosed up now though, burn marks on the agp port and over to the pci, try'd throwing a pci video card in but didn't work.
Have Two PII 333's both overclocked - 500mhz a piece - I did run for a little while at 112 bus, but not to long before I put it back down to 100 bus.
have one scorched video card,at least its still live though and one dead one.
I am planning on putting the 333 each in their own cheaper system(IDE) and using my current parts(UW SCSI) for a new dual celeron.
I will be interested to see how well the clustering does.
bitch,bitch,bitch moan....
That's BS. I have here next to me a quad pentium Pro ALR box, and although at the moment it only has 2 CPUs (PPro 166 512K oc'd to 200) I have run it with 1, 2, 3, and 4 processors. Works Great. My only complaint is that it must have (for performance better than EDO) memory added 8 simms at a time, and FPM parity simms (the only thing it takes) are about 2x SDRAM prices.
It is cool, it has 7 PCI slots (2 independant PCI buses) 5 EISA, Two (2) 550watt power supplies [works fine if one fails, other than an annoying beeper] 6 slot SCA (hot swap [almost] SCSI slots).
The whole thing is a rack mount and has 9 big fans.
An interesting thing is the CPU clock jumpers, it allows you to clock a pentium pro at anything up to 366Mhz. I have had no trouble running 4 ppro 166's at 266 Mhz, but I normally run at 200. (800 bogomips) I would love to try 4 PentiumPro Overdrive chips in it (333Mhz Xeon that fits socket 8)
To be fair, (s)he probably has not heard about it because the official Intel documentation says that
it is not possible. Of course, as you pointed out, documentation is not always, er... 100% truthful.
There is no such thing. There was up to 8 way
Pentium Pro - but even the PII upgrade powerup
crap for these didnt do over dual CPU boards.
If you want over 2 processors you are in Xeon land which is bad for the pocket. People like VA sell them, you can also get the a fair bit cheaper elsewhere. But even "a fair bit cheaper" is in the youch ! category.
Are you sure you need a quad CPU box ? Maybe a
pair of duals (probably you can get 4 or 5 dual
Celeron hacks for the same price)
Alan
No, I'm serious. Supposedly OS/2 Warp Server is SMP enabled for up to 64 CPU's (but optimized for 8 CPU).
I _know_ OS/2 is really only out for x86 CPU's, so where is IBM getting these boxes to test it on?
> Slot1 adapters with voltage and SMP jumpers
I went and tried to find this, but couldn't. Does anybody have a link?
~Nik
Their 128K L2 is not enough to make them good server chips. Pentium IIs and IIIs have 512K which is good enough. Xeons extend the cache even further, which is why they are even better suited to server situations.
A dual Celeron box might be good for CAD or something - a decent workstation, but you probably won't want to extend it to performance-hungry situations.
the k7 is going to be slot 1 according to an article i read from a link off here alphas are sockets (still? i have an older one) the slot that the k7s will be in will be basically a slot2 but incompatible electrically *shrug* that's all according to the article pretty much -Ed
-=[ http://www.legos.org ]=-
Why do we forget so quickly that BogoMIPS are meaningless between different processor types? That's why they're called *BOGOMIPS*. Bogus.
A classic example is that a 486DX2/66 gets a higher BogoMIPS rating than a Pentium 66. Yet which is faster? The Pentium, of course.
BogoMIPS only mean anything when you're comparing two processes of the same type. Remember this. You're only fooling yourself if you use BogoMIPS to benchmark processors. A better test would be to encode an MP3 with each and see which finishes first, or to do a kernel compile.
- =^o.o^=
Linux would need a bit of hacking.
NT would need a new HAL.
(the HAL is a Hardware Abstraction Layer that
handles motherboard issues mostly, and it the
thing that SGI modified for the Visual Workstation)
Check www.centrix-intl.com they have one list for $1299.
Laterz
yamato
I'm not gonna eve sift through all this to see if someone has said this.
There is a special motherboard with special "dual cpu cards", each containing 2 Pentium II cpus...
only this "special" configuration can have quad pII's...
The name of the of the company or board eludes me because, quite frankly, i don't care.
Do a search for 'dual cpu cards' or something...
Have fun,
EL
Listen to your Karma... It's why you are where you are... actually, i was referring to life, not slashdot.
There are Quad PII boards.. Check out www.pricewatch.com. They have two listed, one by Intel and the other by American Megatrends. Also, Isn't the SGI 540 a quad board? The only problem is that if you plan to run a NT server (I don't know why you would, but..) you need a special build of NT. Mucho Denero.
Snoop
K7 all the way, that is if I have the cash, K6-3 otherwise. K7s will me multiple prossesor capable and will offer L2 cache sizes up to 8megs along with 128kb of L1 cache. They will easily beat anythin Intel will throw out.
Skinka needs to get a clue, before he sides with Intels offering he should look at whats out there. The K7 will have the capibilities for multiprossesors, and will have L2 cache sizes up to 8megs and L1 of 128kb, thats 8 times the L2 and 4 times the L1 cache of any Intel product. AMD already can beat Intel in integer prossesing, and with the improved FPU AMD will be on par in the floating point arena. Hands down K7 will rock.
K7 will have multiprossesor capibility along with up to 8megs of L2 cache and 128kb L1 cache, far more than anything Intel has thrown out. K6-3 will be AMD's low end prossesor (which is funny beacuse its already more powerfull than a PIII) when K7 becomes there top of the line. K7 will likely outperform bothe the PIII xeon and the new mercede from Intel.
PPro originally supports only 4 cpus, but ALR demonstrated a :) :)
six-cpu machine, based on a split cpu-bus system with each 3 processors attached
Another proof of original thinking
I recall seeing a machine that was running dual, dual processor motherboards about 2 years ago when the Slot 1s came out. I never saw anything like it ever again, but I believe it was using SuperMicro boards. You're probably SOL at this point though.
A truly great man never puts away the simplicity of a child.
I found only three chipsets that do quad Pentium Pro/Pentium II:
Intel 450GX Orion four-way
Corollary Profusion eight-way
Micron Samurai four-way
There are a few motherboards with quad PPro sockets, but none I could find had quad Slot 1. Intel naturally wants to keep any such motherboards unavailable so they can force you to the more profitable Xeon.
would you imagine the amount of heat that would come out from a quad PII baby?.....you won't need a fan cooler, you'll need something like an air conditioner.
Intel uses APIC (Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller) for SMP. APIC was added to Pentiums and up. It supports 16 CPU's, if the chipset does. Since APIC is patented by Intel, Cyrix and AMD (not sure about WinCHIP) use OpenPIC. Cyrix 6x86 and K5's and up can do SMP. Problem is no chipset has ever supported OpenPIC......
Um, that's not entirely accurate. The Pentium II is a Pentium Pro with MMX. The plain old socket Pentium is dead. Nothing is currently produced of its lineage. The Pentium III is yet another chip technology. The Xeon processors are really just hopped up versions of the name that they carry. I'm not sure of everything that is different about them, except that they have a bigger, faster cache memory on board. That makes them better in the server market. You would not notice a performance increase between a PII and a Xeon when you are playing Riven. But you would probably notice a boost in, say, an SQL or Web server running on Linux.
Remember: As good as I sound, don't assume I know what I am talking about.
Why is it so hot? Where am I going? What am I doing in this handbasket?
Everybody seems to (whenever SMP comes up on
Slashdot) answer with "it's neat, but you're
better off just going with 2 1-cpu boxes."
While it may be true that the cost is lower for
just the CPU and motherboard, what about the cost
of 2 40GB RAID arrays? (One for each server).
And the hundreds of megabytes of memory for each
server. Plus the pricey cases with LED displays
on the front that show processor fan RPM and
redundant power supplies. It certainly is
cheaper to make 2 low-end boxes with just anything
thrown in them, where the CPU is the only concern.
But high-end servers (and I would assume a 4-way
box, while not really high end, is certainly not
end userish level) have a lot more hardware in
them that's expensive than just the processor and
motherboard..
[if i posted more than once in a year i might
make an account]
In order to run SMP, you have to recompile your kernel, but it's not an ordeal by any means. In the new 2.2 kernels, it's actually an option in make {X,menu}config. While generally speaking, SMP kernels will work on UP boxen, you're going to have some amount of overhead (probably no more than 30%), and so it's good to only compile SMP kernels on SMP boxen.
If your using Windows NT, it probably won't see big gains, AFAIK, it's SMP isn't that great.
If your using Linux (or another *NIX) then your dilluting yourself if your thinking about Quad PIII's insted of something like a SGI Origin, or a Sparc, or even an AIX box...
I guess I don't see any reason to TRY to get a quad Intel box, so, that's probably why there aren't many.
+$30 for the board, then the new CPU. But, that's dual.
We're talking quad, and quad boards AFAIK are rare, Xeon only, and in the $1,000+ not $100 area.
Dual PII's fill the gap between Intel and "true workstation hardware" (forgive the term), but when you go to the quad price range, the tables turn.
Plus, unfortunately, Intel systems don't seem to have the "lifetime" of Sun's, SGI's, IBM AIX, and DEC systems. I haven't seen many 5+ year old systems fail in that group. But, I have seen some pretty "dead" intel boxes scattered in the back rooms of labs.
I suggest you price both systems before you buy... We just pulled in an Origin and an Octane at work, when initally we were just shopping for a Dual PII box. We priced the systems with what we would need, and it seemed that the SGI's were going to really thump the Intel's in that price range.
Now, Dealing with IRIX as opposed to Linux, I would pick Linux 10 to 1 anyday. It's just plain easier to work with (system admin wise).
But you really better get a good idea of what a Quad PIII like this guy was asking is going to cost before you say Intell is cheap. Let's look really fast at just this... Pricewatch (cheapest you will find a PIII CPU) shows lowest price on A PIII 500 at $634/each. That makes the total $2,536 for CPU's alone, not counting the motherboard, RAM, case, etc.. etc... And your not planning on stuffing this all in a $18 bargian basement case, are you? $100 for a case, probably $400-$600 for a mother board (IF you find one), $100 for a vid card, etc etc... Your talking about $3,000+ EASY, probably $4,000 easy.
Then call SGI, Sun, IBM, and Alpha retailers, and see what you can get for the same money. Check Memory I/O, Mega/Giga-flops, SPECS, and I think you will see, we're not playing in Intel's field anymore.
Aside from that, I would take the people mentioning that you can't do Quad PII or PIII seriously, unless it has been confirmed otherwise. I think the Xeon is the only one that might do Quad... If I am wrong on anything, it's that..
But as for bang for the buck, Intel nicely fills the gap between AMD's and the Big Boy's in UNIX with it's Duals, but after that, it's out of it's league.
Quad Intel is (IMHO) a very expensive way to go, and in this situation, it's hard to discuss, because the question never mentioned the use of the box, so I don't know if needing Intel is a consideration...
I have seen articals about a few tricks that are needed to make Celerons into Dual'able. So, that may be a bit of bang. But I don't know if it's possable HERE Pricewatch shows it's dual boards, and they ain't cheap, and it seems only Xeon boards are listed.
I would tend to say, go with the dual Celeron tricks if your very technically inclined, go with dual PII's if your not, and if you want more, look at non-Intel options.
VA Research is definately going to be the place to go to see just how much you can get an Intel box to do. They are running at the commercial limits of possabilities with Intel systems. If they don't have it, I would be doubtfull of it's existance. But if you notice the prices (*Which are reasonable considering the quality of componants*), they start playing into the SUN/SGI price range with thier bigger systems.
I know the writer asked about Intel, so this is OT more than the AMD SMP (K7) posts, but as someone with one foot in both the x86 and PPC world just throught I'd drop this..
:-/
Known fact: The PPC G3 (750) does not fully support SMP, there are cache issues. An exception is what the Amiga guys did with the 4way G3 box, but it's still a hack because the CPU doesn't fully exploit SMP (there are cache-related SMP instructions needed that are not there). FYI the G3 is based on a PPC 603e... a notebook chip, but this revision has really good integer (FP is decent... still stomps Intel tho).
The G4, which is based on the PPC 604; both support what's needed for SMP. G4 is 64-bit - initially it will be configured with some compromises on the _motherboard_ so it's a "drop in" to G3 setups. Then there's AltiVec vector processing, 128-bit, which UNLIKE MMX can be executed in paralell with the FPU.
FYI - if you can find multi-processor 604e Macs, like the 9600MP or a Daystay 4-way @ 200MHz, they're supposed to make bitchen Linux boxes. Or so I hear... *I* don't have one.
intel didn't design the pentuim II to be used in quad config, its only single or dual, the ones that do quad is the PPro , xeon, PIII, or PIIIxeon
Nuff said.
Stan "Myconid" Brinkerhoff
SB.
The first real problem with cheap smp was solved when intel developed and patented APIC. This structure has half of the interrupt control needed on the cpu, half in the chipset or auxillary chip like the iS82093AA.
Intel would not license this to AMD or Cyrix so they developed their own OpenPIC standard which the 6x86 and K5 supported. When AMD bought NexGen for their 6th generation design which evolved into the K6, it had no OpenPIC support and it wasn't worth the cost to add. Via did have OpenPIC support in atleast one version of chipset, but I never found a motherboard implementing SMP with it. Linux does indeed support OpenPIC SMP, but only on the PowerPC processors ( see linux/openpic.h). With only Cyrix having processor support for Openpic with the passing of the K5, and intel not letting anyone else make APIC compatible stuff, well, intel is the only SMP game for x86 systems. But OpenPIC was practical and robust enough for Motorola and IBM to make it a foundational part of the whole PowerPC line.
Sad really when you look at the unrelenting control that intel uses on the PC industry to maintain an environment that suits their needs at the expense of everything else.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
I priced this, and have kept up with it, and as a result, I have two PII/300's in my box . Quad CPU's are more expensive, but Duals aren't. When I bought this box (late August '98), all other componenets the same, the SMP mobo and two 300MHz chips was cheaper than a single processor board and a 400MHz chip.
/me can't wait for SMP K-7 boards
-Cheetah
I thought the PII only supported 2-way SMP.
I was reading that SMP Celeron page, and based on what I learned about SMP there, it seems that the PII is only 2-way by design.
True, some ugly hardware hacks on the motherboard could overcome that, but the performance would likely be less than wonderful.
Think of it this way:
Pentium II is the follow-on to Pentium. It can't
do more than 2-way MP because of the way it talks
to its address bus and chipset.
Pentium III is the follow-on to Pentium II, and has the same limitations.
Pentium {II,III} Xeon is the follow-on to Pentium Pro. Pentium Pro can do 8-way MP because it was designed to access its bus and chipset in a more rational manner. Xeon carries much the same design forward, and so can do 8-way MP.
--Corey
Not only will they not deserve liberty or safety, Mr. Franklin, they will be DENIED both!
To answer your question, yes, it is possible to have a four way SMP machine using the Pentium II processor but you wont find such a motherboard. The CPU is not the limiting factor, it's the motherboard "core logic" chipset. Quick review:
Intel 440LX supports one or two Pentium II CPUs (slot 1) with a 66MHz front side bus. Chipset is features an SDRAM memory controller and a dual PCI bridge - one 33Mhz 32 bit PCI, and one 66Mhz 32 bit AGP with 2x mode.
Intel 440BX supports one or two Pentium II CPUs (slot 1) with a 66 or 100MHz front side bus. Chipset features an SDRAM memory controller and a dual PCI bridge - one 33MHz 32 bit PCI, and one 66MHz 32 bit AGP with 2x mode.
Intel 440NX supports up to eight Xeon CPUs (slot 2) with a 100MHz front side bus. Chipset features a four way interleaved SDRAM controller and a dual PCI bridge - one 66MHz 32 bit PCI, and one 33MHz 64 bit PCI. NO AGP!
Now, the first two chipsets are the "cheap" consumer variety. The third chipset is the expensive server variety which is fairly obvious as it supports up to 8 CPUs, four way memory interleave, and offers a 64 bit PCI bus. The trade off is that you don't get an AGP slot - but that isn't needed on a server anyway. It's also intended for slot 2 (Xeon) CPU's. Now, technically, you could design a board with the NX chipset that supported 4 slot 1 CPUs - but there probably wouldn't be much of a market - and Intel doesn't want you to do that anyway. (They might not sell you the chipset at all if they thought you were going to use it for slot 1 designs.)
I studied these companies' offerings in detail about a month ago, when I wondered how much a really _good_ multiprocessor system costs.
The answer is about $30k+ for something like a quad box, and about $100k+ for something with more respectable performance.
I've heard people quote high single-digit $k for Alpha boxen, but I'm still suspicious as to what's on the motherboard.
From what I found, both IBM and SGI had horrible price/performance ratios (for what I was looking for; my primary concern was FP performance). Sun systems were ok, but the real winner from what I could tell was HP. They sell PA-RISC 8500 boxen with large numbers of processors and respectable cache for a (relatively) reasonable price. They have a pricing sheet on their web site, though you have to dig a fair bit for it. Some of the manufacturers give Spec figures, but it's still a good idea to stop by spec.org to find out what the performance of some of the boxen listed actually ends up being.
What I concluded from the survey was that I'm better off spending $10k (Canadian) and buying 15 K62-400 boxen. The problems that I want to solve are easily compartmentalized.
A cluster, OTOH, has to stuff all inter-processor communications through a network cable. This works quite well for easily compartmentalized problems that don't need much access to shared memory. However, if you had a large chunk of memory that you wanted each processor to be able to do more or less random locking, reading, and modification on, your network will go into meltdown. Especially if this memory is distributed over many boxes (i.e. each box contains a part of the very large whole instead of each box mirroring all of a smaller shared memory block).
Myself, when I buy the machine of my dreams, I'll probably go the clustering route. There are plenty of problems that I'd like to play with that don't have unreasonable communications loads, and it is one heck of a lot cheaper to build a cluster for something like that than to pay through the nose for big iron (or even medium-sized aluminum).
Note that you can buy a "Pentium Pro Overdrive" chip, which is essentially a 333Mhz Xeon that fits in a PPro socket.
I doubt they're much cheaper than the regular Xeons, but you'd be able save some money on the motherboard.
--
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