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Dual Pentium 4 Boards

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tread70 said:
the P4 cpu's do not support dual processors only the Xeons do.

I believe Intel blows or cuts internal traces so you can't even bridge it like you can an AMD.

No $50 modern SMP CPUs from Intel any time soon.
 
I heard some non Xeon P4s can but no one will build a mobo for them that can. Might be a licensing restriction imposed by Intel.
 
pip said:

as far as you know

It is not a mater of if he knows, it is a fact, that Intel blows out the Gates that power the SMP circits on the P4's that are not going to be xeons, ie the ones that fail the SMP test, or are just not ment to be Xeons. this is a well know fact. the only way that it could be done is if you made a hardware glued solution, and i dont know if anyone has been able to do it yet.
 
Intel wouldn't blow the smp circuits just because they are retail(and doesn't) it's merely a matter of there being no chipsets out for it yet, there may be a few incompatible willies but almost all previously and currently produced pentium 4s are smp compatible, dunno about cellies though
 
Ok pip, if you say so, i guess i just dont know, i just worked in the Fab in Beverton OR for 2 years, i guess i am just wrong, and every post about the P4 and the blown gates are just wrong also right? I guess it would be too much to ask you for a single link to support your position?
 
I think people sometimes refer to the Xeon as a P4. Is it possibe thats what you heard refered to as a dual P4 retail?
 
I want a Dual AMD and a Dual P4 on the same mobo. :rolleyes:
That would cover the most bases. :p
It would have to use the 762Nb for the AMD's and a 7505 for the P4's.

My old AMIGA 3000 had a motorola 68030 and a I386 in it.
There was even a PowerPc upgrade board for it, and it could run 68k apps on the 68030 and power Pc code on the 604 at the same time.
So if I got the Powerpc board I could have had a 68030, I386 and a 604 cpu all running at the same time.
Oh I also had a AMAX IV card in it as well and could run Mac Os 7.1.
I could copy from windows and paste into amiga or mac os.
The mac emulator actually ran faster than the equivalent Mac.
This A3000 still runs and has only ever had the O/s reinstalled once, that was when I upgraded to Amiga Dos 3.1.
It boots faster than any moden Pc from power on to workbench only takes a few seconds (most of the time is the spin up time of the HD's).
I still use this computer for the Video card, it has a genlock and realtime video effects as multi source switch. The video card cost me $3000 au in 1991.
I even installed Redhat 5.1 on it, but a kernel compile takes over 24hrs. I ended up installing a cross complier on one of my DUAL amd's to do any compiling for the 68k's.
 
At this moment in time, and for the farseeable furture:

Pentium 4 CPUs (non-Xeons) do not support SMP. They will not work in an SMP configuration.

Pentium 4 Xeon CPUs do support SMP. They will work in SMP configuration.


Whatever the reasons behind this, whether it be chipset or CPU support for SMP that has been disabled, dual P4 non-Xeon aint going to happen.

Intel charge more for the Xeons because they are SMP. Making the P4 also SMP compatible would be kinda pointless maybe? Undercutting your own products?
 
theotherphil said:



Kinda like Athlon XP vs MP? ;)

Same idea but AMD didn't do as good a job securing the back door. With AMD you can pick the lock to get in, while Intel welded the door shut so it's impossibe.

If someone developed a mobo to enable the P4 in SMP, they'd violate some kind of patent or licenceing owned by Intel and get into more truble than it would be worth. It's not like they would sell too many of them even if they could.
 
Audioaficionado said:

If someone developed a mobo to enable the P4 in SMP, they'd violate some kind of patent or licenceing owned by Intel and get into more truble than it would be worth. It's not like they would sell too many of them even if they could.

Beg to differ... cough.... BP6.... cough....

;)

But I agree with the door being welded shut. I don't think right now that it's very easily possible to put out a dual P4 board. Certainly not as easy as it was when the BP6 was popular. A lot of R&D time and resources would have to be spent developing a product that would be classified as a "rogue" product anyway.
 
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