Slashdot Mirror
Dual Socket 370 Card for a Single Slot 1 MoBo
Vertigo1 writes "This is a dual Socket 370 card that will allow TWO (2) Socket 370 Celerons into a single Slot 1 motherboard. The pic is here.The company is QDI. From what their page say it requires no special motherboard, but I have yet to confirm it. I dunno if this is really on par with what usually is posted but to go along with your overclocking and cooling stuff I thought this was a nice addition! "
Just be glad you posted that as "Anonymous Coward"
Isn't it strange how Intel can have a run-away sales hit like the Celeron to do nothing but stamp it out for, "our protection."
It is odd to think that if we were a small chips manufacturer that had a hit like the Celeron, it would be our bread-and-butter: Intel can afford to just change the line in order to keep people in their "correct processor class."
I wonder what the margin is that they make on each type of processor? I would venture their net profit on two 370 Celerons is about 1/4 of the net profit they make on a Pentium III-- or maybe 1/6 of the profit on a Xeon III sale.
AP
(All quotes "made up.")
Like to see you fit 2 PPro's on that motherboard =)
Posted by Neothi:
I don't know how much you all know about dual Celery systems, but bxboards.com gives some really interesting info on it. Of course, I would suggest as they do "don't try this at home kids."
For those weaker of heart. ComputerNerd is offering dual Celeron systems that are 'supposed' to be overclocked.
I think it is kind of tall, I mean it does have to fit 2 370 side by side, right?
Now... what exactly do they call a real operating system? Linux ? :-)
---
"Hasta la victoria siempre!" El Comandante
I think you meant to say "...bigger than 2 CPUs..."
My friends, we are nothing but wings on the chicken of society.
abit isn't the company doin ide raid. soyo is. they have a board that debuted at computex. the boards name is SOYO 6BA+III. i dunno if they have a press release easily found on it yet, but i have seen pics
Absolutely true.
I think the reasoning for placing the Power Supply in that location was to help with "fresh" airflow taken from outside the case by the power supply fan while directing it in the direction of the processor. Which in my ATX Mid case has the power supply about 1 inch over my pII chip.
It would be time for a new case.
I don't know about Abit, but a company named Promise has them. Look here:
http://www.aberdeeninc.com/abcatg/MB6601.htm
I use this model at home with a 40 Gig RAID.
Also, Promise is reported to be introducing a newer version that supports ATA66 that will be released sometime in Aug of 99.
This sounds immensely a dodgy hack.
:(
I think I'll go for the ABit BP-6, but I need to find another Celery 300a PPGA first
Chris "Ng" Jones
cmsj@tenshu.net
www.tenshu.net
Okay lets insert some common sense here, the board is just about bigger then 2 CPUs, which IMHO is not really that tall.
>so forget about compatability, forget about case space, forget about this.
I think you're being a little overly harsh.
Sure, many people took a glance at it and thought it was a slocket you could plug into any motherboard. If that's what you wanted, indeed, that's not an option.
However, a motherboard like this has real potential. With the single slot 1, the motherboard can be smaller -- the same size as a single processor system. While some cases may have power supplies in the way of a tall riser like this, others should work just fine. A single slot 1 is cheaper to build than 2, and a single large riser card is cheaper to build than two single CPU riser cards. So viewed as a possible dual-processor motherboard choice, it may be an attractive option. Heat is potentially an issue from having two CPUs so close together, but on the other hand it may make arranging a cooling system easier.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Would it be possible to have a Quad CPU on a Dual Board??? :-)
I just bough an old Tyan Thunder II (66 Bus)... would be nice to put 4 Celeron 400 in it
It looks like MTRR support may or may not be really hairy.
I mean, you're installing two CPU's on a motherboard that's designed for one. Obviously there's no SMP support in the bios.
Even some SMP bioses make the error of only configuring the MTRR registers on the 1st cpu. I'd be surprised if a uniprocessor bios tried to configure the MTRR registers on a second cpu.
I can vouch for the fact that Linux SMP's just fine on Celerons. I'm using a pair of modified MSI MS-6905's and a pair of Celeron 366's in a dual slot 1 LX based motherboard.
However, I can also tell you that MTRR problems can be ugly. My dual celeron refused to load X until i replaced the PCI video card with an AGP video card. For some reason the PCI video card wasn't being set up correctly. I could have fought with it, but i didn't think a 2 meg #9 Motion 771 was worth all that much trouble, and got a G200.
This isn't to say it probably couldn't be worked around. They also may have figured out some way of tieing the MTRR's together. What I'm saying is, if there isn't a workaround in the hardware, or some kind of a bios update (unlikely), it probably won't work out of the box until the kernel is updated to match it.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
this would be fun. 1200 megahertz for under $400.
> a good one, say...NT
NT is not a good OS.
A standard footprint motherboard may be cheaper to manufacture.
Does it take extra parts to make a BX chipset board able to handle dual processors?
Perhaps having them on one card allows QDI to use the standard BX chipset with their own extensions.
Hopefully these'll run BeOS.
BN
Does it mention anywhere there a list of features of the motherboard? Does it mention the chipset? The IDE/ATA speed? PCI and AGP configuration? I find that strange if it was an entire motherboard.
I beleive it will still require a motherboard with an APIC onboard, but then again, I didn't think the signal lines for both processors were on the same connectors. Infact, I kind of doubt there would be, as how would a processor know which one to take. My option is they found a way to fake these signals to the system and have their own method of running SMP....maybe with provided drivers. Then again, I have't seen the product itself, so what does my opinion have to do with anything?
Dan Guisinger
Quantum Warp Laboratories
http://www.qwlsoft.com
http://www.networkedcomputing.com
www.atacomm.com - The Leader in VoIP Product Distributi
if you are going to say that you should say why you dont like it
Pay attention to ;)
At least the parts about this press release :-) :
are broken. The used backslashes instead of
slashes as a directory separator. I wonder why
It is in the main frame on their home page at
www.qdi.ca , they have a splash screen before that...
I have been running dual S370 433's now for a while using the ms-6905 card, it allows running the celeron at 100mhz, voltage changing, and dual proccessors all with a couple jumper changes. Doing seti@home is more fun that way ;-)
Yeah, I'd think the motherboard the card would attach to would have to have bios support for 2 cpu anyway.
- A.P.
--
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Nuff said.
Sigh
Looks like you're right...
Silly how small things can make you happy then not....
Message on our company Intranet:
"You have a sticker in your private area"
beauty is only a light switch away
Yeah, it looks like someone shoved a PCI NIC into the slot. Sure it might not need a special motherboard but it may need a different type of case...;)
Seriously, if this thing works with my Abit BH6 motherboard I would buy it in a second. I'm kinda leary about the compatibility issue though. There has got to be some sort of weird requirements for it.
Im pretty sure that wont fit in my Inwin Mid-ATX case on an Abit BH6 motherboard, at least not without taking out the power supply. Taking out the power supply, hmmmm.....
If you read the rleas a little more closely,
that riser card with the 2 chips works only on their MB.
so forget about compatability,
forget about case space,
forget about this.
now the new abit dual 370 MB,
and the one with built in IDE RAID,
now those are interesting.
this is just eye candy.
(and how long is it gonna be until intel decides to cut this little easy dual celeron thing off?)
Heh, I knew someone else must have an LX...
;-) I finally broke down an bought a dual Celeron system--now I just need to DL Quake III...
AFAIK the Celeron's won't work in an LX. In fact, I don't think much of anything will--I wouldn't even trust a 333 PII
To keep this on topic: how exactly is better than a dual slot 1 with socket 370=>slot 1 adapters? It can't be any cheaper; the board may be (single slot and all) but the cost of the custom card should more than make up for that.
I also get the impression that who ever wrote that product description doesn't speak English as their first language (or second, or at all...). They seem to be using "motherboard" to describe both the dual card and the real mobo.
If you have a decent motherboard they should have come up with BIOS updates to support the celerons, and the dechutes(333mhz PII and up). I've installed a celeron on a Tyan LX motherboard with no problems.
This is a moronic idea. Anyone who would buy one of these things is an idiot.
I've run SMP Linux with two celerons on a dual p2 motherboard. I modified the cpu's by drilling and soldering. Worked great at 2 x 464mhz.
And of course this comes out right after I bought a shiny new Socket-370 mobo... :P
--
Is it just me or is /. IQ dropping bigtime?
sounds from the press release like you need a smp capable OS to use the riser card. a white paper or some more specs would be nice. would be a nice way to get a cheap smp server up.
1) NO, you CANNOT buy two of those cards and make a quad Celeron. Why? The lines which identify the processors are only one bit wide, the memory bus has insufficient bandwidth to handle all four processors, and your dual motherboard's chipset is only designed to scale to two processors. (Many other reasons, those are the highlights.)
2) Multiple CPUs (under an SMP-capable OS) operate in PARALLEL. This means that 400 MHz + 400 MHz = 400 MHz. (Now, as for FPU performance, that's a different matter...but the overall clock speed is the same.) PLEASE stop talking about your 1 GHz machines!
3) YES, you need an SMP-capable OS (i.e. NOT Win9x) to use two processors. Just because they're plugged into a single slot doesn't mean that they automatically operate in parallel.
4) NO, one CPU won't take over if the other fails. (See question 3.) Besides, if CPU #1 crashed, how would you be able to export the register state to CPU #2 to continue?
Yes, I am afraid that this would interfere with my power supply.
Oh, well. Guess I will have to skip this "hot new product" as it were.
010110000010110101010100011110010111000001100101
looks kinda... TALL. Or that an optical illusion?
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
Anyone have these yet?
Thanks,
Dave Manning
Just be glad you posted that as anonymous coward.
I'd break your legs otherwise..
The APIC is on the QDI motherboard, between the ISA and PCI slots.
Large picture of QDI board
Strictly speaking, the APIC is built in to the processor, one in each. It is the I/O APIC that resides in a separate chip. Confusing, huh?
Anonymous pedant.
It is only a few centimeter taller than a Pentium III XEON processor. And usually an ATX case will have the power supply out of the way of the processors, usually with the PS fan blowing across them..(in a full tower case) But then again in a mini-tower or mid tower this would definately be a problem.
That darn Slashdot is so cool... Hey did you pay the phone *(#(Q%$#$ NO CARRIER
I don't see why this can't be done on Win9X.
Simple: The Win9x kernel can not granulate.
I have no idea how they're expecting to be able to do SMP under Win9x. They'd have to come up with their own SMP engine and tack it onto the kernel I suppose. But then I'm no SE.
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
>>I have no idea how they're expecting to be able to do SMP under Win9x. They'd have to come up with their own SMP engine and tack it onto the kernel I suppose. But then I'm no SE.
It should be possible for software to take advantage of whatever hardware is available. When Win95 first shipped there was no such thing as a "3D Card" but we were able to use them. I don't see why SMP should be any different. As long as you've got a kernel that can support multiple threads SMP should be possible in one form or another.
LK
i don't see anything on that page saying that the dual celeron slot adapter works on any other board, it is always referred to as a motherboard, not an adapter board.
Would anyone know what chipsets this setup supports ? I'v been looking to upgrade my LX Pentium II 266 to something faster. Celeron is my only viable option because of the 66 Mhz bus restriction.
I want this !!
Message on our company Intranet:
"You have a sticker in your private area"
beauty is only a light switch away
Does that QDI board have an APIC chip?
Abit Dual Socket 370
Picture of Motherboard
Computex piece both of these were listed
ABIT Announces the Release of the BP6, The World's First Dual Socket370 Motherboard!
Taipei, Taiwan, May 31th 1999--ABIT announces the release of the World's First Dual Socket 370 motherboard, the BP6. The ABIT BP6 doubly defies conventional limitations by offering both Dual Socket 370 and UDMA/66 on a BX chipset board, once again proving that with ABIT, "Yes, It's possible". The BP6 is based on the award winning design of ABIT's BX line of motherboards. All the great features of our flagship models have been kept, and a lot of amazing new features have been added.
krex.com had PPGA 300As last week, for about $53 each. I have 2 running at 450, no problems. Cranked out rc5 for 24 hours, seems fine... although I am always a little skeptical of crazy overclocking schemes, this seems to work very, very well.
The bxboards article slams the dual celeron setups because of the small cache size, saying essentially that the small cache makes the likelihood of getting a cache hit worse as threads are swapped in and out... but having 2 processors should make this *less* of a problem than with a single 128k cache. I think. Anyway, I my kernel compiles in nothing flat now. And that's what I wanted.
Dont get excited. This is a whole set, it wont work with other MBs. Look at their pic, the APIC is on the MB and not the riser card.
The 128k cache increases pressure on the mem bus but makes up for it 'performance' wise be being a lot faster.
On SMP the extra misses cripple the memory bus, so the faster cache can't completely make up for it.
For some apps it's still a win.
I doubt however, it was that big a win on your kernel compiles (on a dual 400 with 256megs ram, I see 2x w/ SMP over UP.. What do you see?)
I might off here...
But that lil setup still wouldn't allow
you to use 2 CPU's like that. I think It might
allow you to have a redundancy (sp) within you system... or not? (one chip fries, the other still goes??)
Yes! I also have a working system.. Asus P2B-DS,
pair of Cele 300a's running 450 or 464.
I was doing the drilling/jumpering mod as a side buisness, for a while there.. till the socket 370 converters killed interest. (tho I hear they challange overclocking with extra trace length and connector effects)
Both 2.0.35/36 and 2.2.5 kernels run fine, detect processors, etc... I've been too busy to do much benchmarking since converting to RH 6.0, or even much decent testing back then, but on the 2.0 kernel, I would get compile times (-j unlimited)
of 1 min 28 seconds, running between 10-20 copies of gcc! This on a 64MB system, with (at the time) a old Quantum Fireball 1.08Gb ide drive..
Sometime I'll get some tests run with the 2.2 kernel and the new UDMA drive.
Ahem... there I go, talking stats and parts like a real bithead. Ya'd tink I used to hop up cars...
:-)
Meant to comment on the dual Abit board. I think it would be a MUCH better solution to SMP 370's than the plugin cards, for reasons mentioned in my last post. Cleaner signals, less clock/signal skew possibilites.. gotta be more stable.
I still suggest slot 1 chips modified, over the 370's in the slocket solutiion, tho the native dual 370 should be as good or better.
The 2-CPU card can only work with a special motherboard. Big Deal. So Buy 2 socket MB from a reputable manfuacturer...this whole things seems very deceptive...
Blar.
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
>>I have no idea how they're expecting to be able to do SMP under Win9x. They'd have to come up with their own SMP engine and tack it onto the kernel I suppose. But then I'm no SE.
It should be possible for software to take advantage of whatever hardware is available. When Win95 first shipped there was no such thing as a "3D Card" but we were able to use them. I don't see why SMP should be any different. As long as you've got a kernel that can support multiple threads, SMP should be possible in one form or another.
LK
I couldn't find any mention of an Abit MB with support for IDE RAID on their website. Anyone care to include a URL?
Life is like an egg better scrambled than fried. -- Ken Sawatari
The release sez : ...
> Legend QDI, one of the world's largest PC motherboard
> manufacturers, today announced the launch of
> TwinMagic, the first dual processor motherboard
^^^^^^^^^^^
It's a complete set , not just a plugin CPU module.
At least I understud it that way.
How would a stupid OS (like Win95) use the processor(s)?? Would it see it as one processor & therefore use both??? Pretty good if it does. Dual processing on Win95 would certainly help me with my Championship Manager 3 running 10 leagues.....
Having dual processors on 'single CPU' OS's is the only benifit I can see from this device. I would have thought that if you want to use two processors - buy a dual processor board!!
Just my $0.02
Superstarhorsechicken
What about SMP under linux? Yes? No? What about overclocking? How does a fan fit?
I'm doubtful.
There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
So, can I take two of these and plug them into a dual PII/III board and get a quad processor? I suspect not since I thought that I had heard that the PII/III chipset only supports 2 processors. Anyone know for sure?
This looks like something that escaped from ;)) going to know that it has two processors to use?
some derranged engineer's lab.
It is still a single-socket motherboard. How the Hell is the OS (a good one, say...NT?
Weird.
I wonder if yo have a dual slot 1 MB if you can make it a quad cpu MB with that?
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does it work without any BIOS stuff though.....Will it work an any mobo? I have a BH-6...seems like having two processors would confuse it; what would the clock speed be? Normal? Excuse the dumb questions, this just seems too good to be true.