SMP Doing AMP??

[bergie007]

I have just recently removed Win98 and Win2K Server from my PC to

install Win2K Prof. Edition. Imagine my delight at finding the system

very stable (except for my crappy ISA NIC's that cause memory address

problems) and the SMP working perfect. This was on 1x 200MMX and 1x

166MMX. They both worked perfect at 166 and 200 with the 166 as the

first CPU. The 166 sees a 1.5 multiplier as just that, defaulting to

166@66FSB, but the 200 can do 233 easy and is stable to 266. I swopped

the two and put them in as 200(CPU1) and 166 (CPU2) and clocked up to

233@66x3.5 . I happend to run the SysInfo tool today and i saw that the

CPU's were doing 233 and 166 respectively. CpuId says the same (pics

attatched). Is my mobo really doing AMP Asymmetric Multi Processing) or

is this just a software thing? BTW, it's a Gigabyte GA-586DX mobo with

HX chipset. How do I get them to do SMP? Must I have identical

processors or what since it's been doing 2x200mhz just fine??

http://mysite.mweb.co.za/residents/sdbeukes/cpu1.JPG
http://mysite.mweb.co.za/residents/sdbeukes/cpu2.JPG

Hope these links work...

[Kingslayer]

AMP doesn't mean SMP at two different speeds. What AMP is, is what AMD is trying to pull off (horribly I might add) where one thread is sent to one CPU the next thread the the other. Where SMP one thread is sent to each CPU for processing.

You can run that board at 166 and 200, but If it's possible to overclock the 166 seperately I would take it up to 200 just to make things even.

[SP]

Intel has never said that it isn't possible to run different speed processors in a SMP system. It is possible in some motherboards. I've heard of people doing it before. The main requirement is that they both have the same FSB. They must run at the same FSB since there is only one FSB. So, if you have 2 processors that had different FSB speeds youd have to some how force them to the same FSB. It's also recommended ( although perhaps not mandatory) that both processors be of the same type and support the same feature set. For example running a Pentium III and an original celreon together would not be recommended. The reason being that some software might attempt to identify the CPU in one thread and then assume that's the cpu all threads are running on and then enable code that would only be supported on that particular processor. With the example I mentioned earlier of an original celeron and a Pentium III we can easily see how this may be an issue as the Pentium III would support SSE instructions and the celreon would not. If an application then attempted to execute an SSE instruction in a thread that was executing on the celeron it would be an invalid opcode.