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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! "
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.
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.
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?)
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.
For quad cpu operation, you need four
:-) )
... :-)
arbitration signals (BR#0-BR#3).
PPro and Xeon have them on slot 2,
but PII only have BR#0 and BR#1 on slot 1.
Celeron has BR#0; BR#1 is not documented,
but it is there (AN15, but maybe removed from
intel without notice).
As there are many undocumented ("n.c.") pins
on the celeron, it is imaginable, that there
are BR#2 and BR#3 somewhere as well, but
that doesn't help: the LX and BX chipsets
only support BR#0 and BR#1 (but the chipsets
have "n.c."-pins, too
But with some simple hardware and software tricks,
it migth be possible to use quad celerons:
You need an additional PLD (~$2) on the
Dual Socket 370 -> Slot 1 Adapter, that
performs a kind of "sub arbitration".
This would cheap and simple to do, so
that memory and i/o accesses might be
performed correctly by all 4 CPUs, but:
Two CPUs would have id #0 and the other
two would have id #1. That will cause
problems, using the standard APIC-comunication
functions. But maybe with the right
little piece of software