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Petition Intel Not to Disable SMP Celerons
McKing writes "Cpu Review has a petition online to let Intel know that technical users do not want the SMP ability of the Celeron CPU's to be disabled. Several sites have stated that Intel will disable the AN15 pin on Socket 370 motherboards to discourage Socket 370 SMP systems. "
The cache isn't faster, but it's got one less level, so although it thrashes more often, its thrashes are much lower-latency. Depending on the code, this can be anywhere between much faster and much slower.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
I personally don't own a celeron processor, nor do I plan to buy one. However, I respect the people who choose the celeron over the Pentium II or III, as well as their reasoning. I don't think it should be a problem to allow users to run Celeron-based SMP systems. (Intel would be hurting their own market. They think that if they disable it on the celeron, they're forced to buy a PII or PIII, when in reality, they could just opt for an AMD based system.)
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-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
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Remember, the people building SMP systems out of Celerons are generally hackers trying to build the maximum computer on a shoestring. This enables Intel to sell them two processors instead of one, which undoubtedly offsets the other considerations. I'm considering building a dual-Celeron system myself. However, if they disable SMP, I'll just build a single Celeron machine. They certainly won't be getting any extra revenue from me by killing SMP!
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No, I'm talking about the newer Celerons, which have two levels of cache, vs. the P3, which has 3 levels of cache.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
(or was this macro? damn, maybe I should have studied more too...)
Price discrimination isn't the result of a happy, healthy, ideal marketplace. It's something that monopolies can do to turn most of that annoying "consumer surplus" straight into profit for themselves. In an ideal market, with lots of producers, anyone who tried to pull a stunt like this would simply be undercut and beaten down by their competitors who didn't disable cheap SMP chips.
We'll see how soon Athlon SMP motherboards come out. It's not quite in the Celeron price range, but between a bus designed for point to point SMP, and a cheap set of K7-500s with that sweet, sweet FPU, dual PII systems just aren't going to cut it.