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Hardware

Ask Slashdot: Finding Quad Pentium II Motherboards? 179

Posted by Cliff from the where-are-they? dept.
Another member of Clan Anonymous Coward writes in with this question: "I have been looking for a quad pII board but have yet to actually find one. If you know where I can find one, send me an email to wakko@animx.eu.org. Please send all 'pII's sucks amd rocks' messages to /dev/null."
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Ask Slashdot: Finding Quad Pentium II Motherboards? More

Ask Slashdot: Finding Quad Pentium II Motherboards?

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  • Okay, here's the deal for the QUAD CPU do-it your-selfer. You can get the Intel SC450NX
    chassis which includes a big chassis with a Quad CPU motherboard, built-in video, UW2 SCSI
    controller, 3 hot-swap 400W power supplies and a whole bunch of fans (11 to be exact). The
    chassis can purchased for $3999 from http://www.acmemicro.com/price1.htm. You'll
    still need to add CPU's (about $700 each for the
    400MHz/512K cache variety) and disk(s). So you're
    talking about $8000 for your basic system. Personally, I would go for 4 nicely equipped dual
    CPU PII systems instead which would cost about the same.
  • And even more important for some applications:
    The communication link between two computers is _way_ slower than the communication between two CPU:s on a dual board. You could of course use gigabit ethernet, but you can buy a dual PII for the price of one gigabit ethernet card.. :)

    /Andreas
  • If you want that much power, you dont want an Intel process.. grab a Sun Ultra 2, with dual UltraSparc-II 300mhz processors. That alone will kill any combination of pentium processors out there today. Then throw in Creator 3D graphics and you got your self a killer system
  • My understanding was that the PentiumII couldn't do more than 2-way SMP, due to a design decision by Intel. That was why Pentium Pros are still used. The Xeon processors can do 4-way and above, and those are the ones used by VA Research.
  • Posted by mhamblin:

    I have to post... literally just got SMP working on this quad-Pentium! :)

    The best way I know to find hardware is to know people unless you want to pay a lot of money. The best way to know the right ppl is to start a Linux User Group at your local University, either that or become President. Then after you become the Linux "expert" for the whole University, you are in a good position to meet people who are willing to make trades on hardware. Hold a hardware swap, you'll be amazed at what turns up. Maybe it's crazy, but it's a ton better than that 486DX4 120 I've been using for a couple years now :)
  • Posted by hardwarewhore:

    Pentium II's only have breq's for 2 processors, you can read about it in the intel manuals. Maybe you can modify the PII to get a couple extra breqs out of it like you can the celeron, but I doubt it.
  • The reason you might not want to cluster is that you have to buy (n * largest memory image you run) where n is the number of nodes. Of course, you get n-fold availability if you monitor and failover the nodes, but you pay for it.

    With an SMP box, you buy your RAM for all n processors in the box. The OS and hardware had better be up to snuff if you're going to run large-scale SMP; ensuring this is not cheap either.

    AFAIK the cheapest way to do 4-way SMP is with PPros. You may be able to substitute PII-Overdrive processors on a PPro mobo and drive down the price since the PII-OD is effectively a slow Xeon. But then you might have to shop for (expensive and slow) nonstandard memory.

  • PII-OD (Score:1)

    by jabbo ( 860 )
    It's a Pentium II OD and they're around $400-500.

    That's a significant savings over a Xeon... ;-)

    Shortly I should be upgrading my hoary old dual PPro to them and upping the RAM to 128MB. I decided the cost of getting old memory is less than that of a new computer, and the box is a ROCK... no complaints, EVER.

  • G4! (Score:1)

    by jpatters ( 883 )
    I'll be placing an order for a quad (or at least dual) PPC G4 board for my Powermac 9600 just as soon as Newer Technology announces it.
  • It is also rumored that IBM will be building G4 chips with up to four G4 cores per chip. The multi core G4's won't have AltiVec, though. It should be possible to build a fairly low cost sixteen way box using those.
  • and 4 machines even cheaper by much more than a quad CPU board? IMO, clustering single CPU machines is a better choice than attempting to pack a single machine with more CPUs. Besides for the same expense, you'll be able to build a bigger cluster (more total CPUs, and therefore computationally more powerful) of single CPU machines than if you attempt to build one big massive parallel machine. Maybe there's some tremendous advantage of SMP over clustering (like Beowulf) which I am not seeing. Feel free to bash me about for my ignorange.

  • ...with a question. Is SMP capability included in the newer kernels, or do you have to compile a different /special kernel? Thanks in advance.

    ----------------

    "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
  • openpic doesn't need cpu support, so it would be possible to run the K6 in SMP mode, but there's no boards.

    Perhaps if slashdot readers emailed Via and Acer Labs this might change.

    (k6-3 with it's integrated L2 cache would be a great SMP chip).
  • ... when it comes to multiple processors in an x86 architecture, they are the only game in town.

    So why stick with the x86 architecture? I've been running quad CPU Sparcs under Linux since 1996 or so (admittedly, SMP support was a bit ropey back then). Also, Sparc Linux happily scales to 16 CPUs, and you don't tend to run into the same "my frobnozz QX-439 chipset doesn't support more than 2 CPU" type issues.

  • Even disregarding the technical limitations (P2 being limitted etc), your chances of finding these are low. First of all, most people interested in 4-way SMP are going to be working for companies, who don't put their own boxes together, they just buy from Dell, Compaq or whatnot. Secondly, it gets unwieldy fitting four processors into a standard form factor. I'd look carefully at what you're doing to see if you *really* need something doing 4-way SMP (refer to the previous "Is SMP worth it" AskSlashdot), few things will actually run faster on a 4 way SMP box than they would on 4 separate machines for probably half the cost.
  • Yes, the AMD K-7 is supposedly designed with multi-processor in mind from the start. It will not be compatible with current x86 motherboards though (Like intel bothered with motherboard compatibility on the PentiumPro, or Pentium II???), it will use DEC (Compaq) Alpha motherboards instead (but will remain x86 instruction set compatible).

    I make no gaurentees about the above information, but it is what I understand from following AMD recently.

    Loren Osborn

  • FYI... I typically buy AMD chips because I believe that they are better quality chips, and faster than equivalant Intel models... Price is not my main concern when buying a CPU... I would probably buy AMD even if they were slightly more expensive than Intel.

    As far as Cirix and WinChip go, I haven't heard to many positives from them with regard to quality or speed. Therefore I would not be likely to buy Cirix or WinChip despite their low price.

    Loren Osborn

  • This actually ISN'T 100% off topic. I just wanted to say:
    Yes, I do believe that AMD makes superior products, to Intel (despite my recent customer service experience with AMD), and I don't agree with some of the things that Intel is doing now (especially Proc ID Numbers), but when it comes to multiple processors in an x86 architecture, they are the only game in town. The AMD K-5 and K-6 series chips level-1 caching architecture is incompatible with the SMP architecture. As far as Cirix and WinChip, I don't know about SMP compatibility, but I am not particularly impressed by anything that I have heard about either of their chips.

    Loren Osborn

  • would you need such a beast? No one has yet explained this to me.

    I've worked on dual pII systems, and they're nice'n'fast. A dual celeron hack is a thing of beauty. But my understanding was always that more than 2-processors was not really a speedup on Intel architecture, which has too many memory access hangups to get it right.

    The exception to this _may_ be AMI, since I seem to remember them having crazy in-house designed memory config hacks that made things much more reasonable.

    In any case, you are much _much_ better off with a dual-pII 450 machine than with quad ppro's -- the pII's are faster and access memory better (can you say 100mHz FSB?). Why anyone would still buy a ppro is beyond me.

    If your requirements still aren't met, you need to stop the train and find another architecture. Alpha and SPARC are both civilized architectures that run civilized os's (like linux :) and do SMP _beautifully_. Alpha systems are _very_ cost effective on a per-performance basis, and Sun has some new low end workstations that are also quite reasonable.

    Or we could all wait for SGI to bring out the SMP Visual Workstation, with SGI-designed memory architecture. Mmmmmmm.....visual workstations....soylent green.....
  • My Celeron 450a is quite reasonable.

    It's the 10,500 rpm HD's that'll do ya in these days. I suggest mounting them in rails in a front accessable 5.25" slot, putting some static foam in front as a dust filter, and cooling the drives that way.

    Two of my friends recently lost data to HD crashes because of heat. One was a Seagate Medallist Pro 7200rpm UDMA drive. The other was some 10krpm scsi drive. Both fine drives, but they run _very_ hot. Be careful.
  • As a side note, Alphas come in several varieties. I would hesitate to put them all into the same category if we're going to separate the PII from the PIII. I would almost feel ashamed about buying a 21064, but a 21264 would be just swell.

    Oh, and you left out the DragonBall and the ColdFire, which even though technically are microcontrollers, can still run Linux. And, some of us may still be planning on buying low-end chips (like Sparcs, 80486's, P5's, 680x0's) until the day they pry out abused checkbooks from our cold dead fingers. Old Sun hardware rocks. 486's, well, not so much. And there's just a classic feel to the warm monochrome glow of a Sun 3/50 that fills me with joy.

    Leapfrog

  • This is correct. The workstation m-boards only support 2 Xeon's, but do throw in an AGP slot. The server allows four, more memory capacity (8 SIMMS or something like that), and no AGP.

    I think 4 processors would be overkill in anything but a server situation, and then only if you doing database stuff. Or generating Slashdot pages on the fly for the masses...
  • Er, price/performance? Then again, I suppose if you're looking for 4way SMP then you're in a different class.. The Ultra Enterprise 450 OEM board (AXi? or is that the U10+SCSI?) is a good foundation for a quad proc system. I actually kinda like Integrix's RAIDs, and they sell a cloner E450. As does Tatung and a large number of others. Don't buy Sun unless you have a nice discount with them or are into lots of $$$ pain.

    If you really want to cook lotsa keys, drop 4 400MHZ Ultra2s in that pup and wire it into a hardware RAID (very little sucks ass more than software RAID).. Swizaeet..
  • because, by definition, an OS must have incorporated LVM and JFS to be considered civilized. And you must be able to boot off an LVM/JFS disk.

    (Being able to chdev -l sys0 would be nice too ;)
  • IIRC, that was one of the selling points for K7 systems. And the K6 (the entire line) does have SMP built in, but no chipsets support K6 SMP, as there really isn't much of a market. Usually, SMP is only for either graphics work or work as a server, and the K6 has horrible FPU perfromance comparted to a Intel chip at the same clock speed, and the K6 would only be used in a low-end webserver without SMP.

    Tim
  • So what else besides clock speed do you need to match? I was thinking of doing the same thing for my next computer.

    Steve
  • Read the specs at:
    http://support.intel.com/support/motherboards/se rver/sc450nx/procsupp.htm
  • The APIC bus specs is one thing, what the CPU implements is another. The PIIs only support 2-way SMP. Electrically they can only drive 2-way buses, so even if they could support more in their APIC support, they don't. That's like the UW-SCSI chips which support 16-node setups but can only drive 8.
  • The Celerons are P2s in their core and have the same SMP support. Intel just did not provide the required control pins on the Celerons (and these can be used with the SMP adapters). Therefore, if I'm not wrong, Celerons also support only 2-way SMP just as a P2.

    Probably, if the P2 would support more than 2-way in their chips you could probably connect more. But they can't electrically drive a SMP bus with more than 2 nodes, so operation would be either unreliable or unusable.
  • thx

    like it will matter, I can hardly afford my palm IIIx :)
    ---------------------------------------
    The art of flying is throwing yourself at the ground...
    ... and missing.
  • I've been drooling about quad processor 'puters for a while now and I got a question.

    I've had a dual ppro for a while now (tiz only a dual board, so lets just assume its a quad for my question). Could I slap a third chip in for a total of 3 processors or does it have to be 4?

    Edukate me fellow geeks!
    ---------------------------------------
    The art of flying is throwing yourself at the ground...
    ... and missing.
  • I had a dual ppro 233 box (oc'd 180s) and all I had to do was buy 2 good cpu coolers and fill the spots in the case for fans with fans.

    pumped out a good bit of heat, but I didnt need to supercool anything. Made a kick ass web server/quake2 server too :)
    ---------------------------------------
    The art of flying is throwing yourself at the ground...
    ... and missing.
  • It is possible. I am on one now.

    It's not a good idea to say something is not possible just cause you have not heard of such a thing. That's called ignornace and M$ism.

    Cheers
    --
  • It's true that multiple CPU + SCSI tends to generate more heat than single CPU + UDMA. There is one solution for that though ... it's called a fan. But adding 10 fans inside an almost airtight box WILL NOT HELP! What you really want to do is open a "window" (sorry) in your case so that air can get in or out!!

    I can give my nachine as an example. It was a dual PII 350 and the motherboard was showing 41 degrees celsius before modification. Then I took my jigsaw .. made a circular hole the size of a dead power supply fan .. and stuck a fan in there. Temperature has now dropped to a constant 31.5 degrees despite now running at 392Mhz (112Mhz bus)!! Note also that extracting the hot air on top of the CPUs seems more efficient than blowing fresh air on them.

    All this to say that HEAT is not a real issue unless you try to overclock a P90 to 600! The main problem is that standart PC cases have really bad air circulation so your fans end up moving a lot of hot air around wich is much less cooling than getting the heat out of the box.

    that was my 2 cents.
  • Shared storage is an issue. We bought a Netapp for that... that of course isn't within everyone's budget, nor am I completely happy with it (Short answer - a Netapp is nifty, and mostly functional. Mostly functional is Ok for something that costs 1/10th of the price. Hell, maybe I'm doing something wrong.). For most web related things, carbon-copy machines are fine until you get to the Yahoo range of traffic. But if you're that bleeding edge, you have tons of consultants telling you what to do with your servers, and thus different problems.
  • Sun's Fibre Channel and some ultrawide SCSI disc arrays allow multiple computers to share not only several drives in the disc array but can actually share volumes. That means several computers can share real hard disc volumes with the high speed and low latency of ultrawide SCSI. With these solutions, beowulf clustering can actually be a feasible alternative to expensive SMP motherboards for i/o-intensive tasks. Kris

    Kriston J. Rehberg
    http://kriston.net/ [kriston.net]

  • No! Go and get two PPGA Celeron 333 (~$75 each), two Slot1 adapters with voltage and SMP jumpers (MSI sell them AFAIR) and plug them into one of those cheapish gigabyte dual boards - you will end up with a dual processor system for little more than $350. And I know people who run them at 500 MHz with no problems. Where else can you get 1GHz power for less than 400? Or even two Boxes? (Consider RAM, Soundcards and all that stuff)

    Thats really unbeatable MIPS for the buck ratio.

    Fionn

  • you might as well read the posts before it as well, i.e. normal pII's don't support 4-way, only single and dual. But Xeons are very nice.. mmm. i'd normally say get some AMD action, but currently the K6 line doesn't support SMP at all. (hopefull k7 will)
  • most of the time? yes :P :-)

    SMP is cheaper, but is somewhat more of
    a hassle, and it means that you keep this
    room FREEZING so your computers don't overheat.
    :P

  • The 2.2 kernel supports SMP with a simple configuration switch. The 2.0 kernel has some very primitive SMP support, and you have to specially compile for it.

    If you wanna put together an SMP box, be carefull. Either buy a complete system, or be very carefull as to the chassis you select. I'm waiting for another chassis to arrive because when I put everything together, the internal 3.5" disk bay was sitting right on top of the SDRAM DIMMS. Ouch.

  • It was my understanding that if you clustered some machines, you'd have to re-write your programs to make calls to some kind of library like PVM.

    Is there any way just to take a standard multi-threaded program like, say, an oracle server, and run it on a cluster without recompiling the oracle stuff to use PVM or whatever other library?

    lemme know...i'm quite interested, but not so informed (yet).

    -Doviende

  • It's also recommended that you match the stepping and the batch if possible. Basically you want the chips to be as close to identical as possible. That's normally why it's better to buy the chips all at the same time.
  • PII does come in the 4-way flavor, I don't know where Dell got them but they introduced a rather new server with 4 PII's in parallel. Can you buy these motherboards? I have no idea. Thhe servers themselves come in very large racks with the mobos on shelves for easy access. I want one.
  • As an addendum the server is the PowerEdge 6300 by dell. It uses a quad processor design that can support up to 4 Xeons per shelf. I would suppose you could do a lil hotwiring and get it to accept a regular PII.
  • Here's the URL for a comparison of Intel's chipsets.

    http://developer.intel.com/design/chipsets/linec ard.htm

  • I looked at VAResearch. They have quad
    P-III Xeon and quad Xeon machines, but no
    quad P-II machines. I think the other posters
    are correct: there ARE no quad-P-II boards.
  • Skinka needs to get a clue, before he sides with Intels offering he should look at whats out there.

    Ok. Lets look at what is out there. See any K7's? - I bet not. I know all about the K7 and am a big fan of it. I also know the that there aren't any in stores, in fact, AMD said just yesterday that the K7 will ship late. Whatever AMD will do in the future don't mean squat if you need a fast system now.
  • No...the K7 will use its own interface, named slot A. This is not rumor, it is fact. AMD has been demonstrating some alpha K7s for a while now. Slot A has the same dimensions as slot 1, this was done to make it easier for motherboard manufacturers making slot 1 boards to transition to slot A boards. But slot A is not slot 1, or slot 2. It uses the Alpha's EV-6 bus. By the way, although the 21164 Alpha is a socket based chip, the 21264 uses the exact same slot A interface as the K7. Off topic, I know, but uhh... does this mean that if I were to have say, a K7, and decide I wanted something else, that I could just yank out the CPU and drop in an Alpha? Ohh baby.. that'd be sweet... K7 looks to be a pretty cool cip, I think... And if it is similar to an Alpha, well, I have that much more repsect for it. Ok, enough babbling from me. Darmox
  • hmmm i imagine that makes my quad PII xeon compaq server useless huh??
  • I use a dual 450 box and it has always run perfectly, once the initial bugs from the pre 2.0.35 SMP were worked out. With 2.2 it screams. It blows slightly warm air out the back, but is no worse than my P90. I find that most PIIs run cooler than many versions of the classic pentium, due to 5.5v vs 2.2 and other such details.
  • About 5 years ago, I went to a "supercomputer" conference (quite impressive, actually, Intel brought along 2 Paragon Deltas, SGI had a bunch of Onyxes and better...)
    At this conference IBM had a few "toys." One of which was a PowerPC *notebook*. This is before Apple had even released a single PPC Mac, and the only PPCs were IBM workstations. This notebook was running a PPC version of OS/2 2.1. The IBM guy said it was great, and that unfortunately, the OS wasn't ready for prime time yet, as x86 emulation wasn't very good (for running Windows programs.)
    So, IBM did port OS/2 to PowerPC, but for some reason, they never released it. I was a little disappointed, as PPCs looked great, and I was running (and VERY happy with) OS/2 for a few years then (and a few years after.)
  • About 5 years ago, I went to a "supercomputer" conference (quite impressive, actually, Intel brought along 2 Paragon Deltas, SGI had a bunch of Onyxes and better...)

    At this conference IBM had a few "toys." One of which was a PowerPC *notebook*. This is before Apple had even released a single PPC Mac, and the only PPCs were IBM workstations. This notebook was running a PPC version of OS/2 2.1. The IBM guy said it was great, and that unfortunately, the OS wasn't ready for prime time yet, as x86 emulation wasn't very good (for running Windows programs.)

    So, IBM did port OS/2 to PowerPC, but for some reason, they never released it. I was a little disappointed, as PPCs looked great, and I was running (and VERY happy with) OS/2 for a few years then (and a few years after.)
  • Thanx for all your comments. One person wanted to know why I'd want it. Basically, the way things go these days, the fastest pII is less than entry level the next year. I figured that getting more horse power would last for a while and to keep from the yearly upgrading.

    I already bought a dual pII board with 2 450's. I love it.. Compile kernels and play quake2. Pretty nice to compile the kernel in just under 3 minutes using make -j 4 (don't ask .g.)
  • Hmm...

    Are you going to try and make a dual 400 (o'c to 600) Celeron?

    That I'd like to see...

    BTW, what type of motherboard (and chipset) is this?

    Kudos for realizing that one shouldn't run IDE on a dual system.
  • I remember when the !@#$ mobo's were $2500 w/ no CPU's.

    Even if you do by and populate one. 70pin ECC memory is high!!!

    Better to build a dual Celeron 400 and smile.

    If you do decide to do this, 200x256 will give you better performance than 200x512. Don't ask why.

    I remember reading this in a NetPower (now defunct) review like 3 years ago.

    Hope this helps.

    --Al
  • With SMP systems, in addition to clock speed, you also need to match cache size...

    I.e. 512k n.e. 1024k, etc. etc. even if you are using Forth.... :^P

    Good luck!
  • BTW, who all here is planning on buying a K7 system?

    You bet I am. The very first day they come out, my order is in with Ingram. Unless I can get a dual or quad mainboard later on, in which case I'm holding out until then.

    Imagine having an dual or quad K7 Linux machine. Not one Intel chip, not one line of MS code. For cheap. That's a very nice thought.

    Do the poll, Rob.

    -B

  • Skinka said:
    Pentium II sucks in 4-way configurations, that is. AMD's offering suck even more.

    AMD's quad CPU offerings would suck. Because they don't offer it. There aren't any AMD processors that can do SMP because Intel holds the necessary instructions pretty close to the vest.

    However, the original poster was all wet and showed a significant lack of understanding. Send it to /dev/null my ass. I have Red Hat 5.2 running on an AMD K6-2/300 and on a Pentium II 300. You want to talk BogoMIPS? 599.65 for the AMD, 348.16 for the PII. Same amount of RAM, same HDD, same pretty much everything (except mainboards and CPUs).

    Pricewatch say that the PII/300 costs $148. It also says a K6-2/300 costs $49. So there's a three-to-one ratio there. What would you rather have as a quad machine?

    Even if the AMD supported SMP and even if the K6-2 had half the BogoMIPS, I'd still get an AMD quad machine. And I've read that the K6-3/450 will outperform a PIII/500 for some things. No cache. Right. How about a meg of L3 cache? Per CPU. At half the cost of a PentiumIII.

    I can't wait for the K7.

    -B

  • Bare in mind that if you don't buy the multi-proc with a full complement of processors, it could be that much harder for you to fill the empty slots further down the line.

    I'm already running into this problem with my dual-capable P2-266. I bought it with a single processor, but now that I'm thinking of adding a second, I'm having to hunt for just the right twin/match.
  • The catch with using IDE and a dual system compared to SCSI is that the dual system will be slowed down by the (normally) slower access and throughput rates of an IDE harddrive. By using SCSI you will have faster access rates and throughput that will vastly improve the performance of the system. I know this because I am running a dual ppro 180 with an UDMA 33 IDE drive attached to the M-board. I also have a cheap SCSI2 card and cartridge drive. Teh access to teh SCSI card is equivilant to the harddrive, and there is much better than SCSI2 out there.
  • oh yes they make quad alphas... from a server a school...

    [miker@wpi.wpi.edu]~/>info
    Host name: wpi.WPI.EDU
    IP address: 130.215.24.6
    MAC address: 00:00:f8:1a:c4:27
    Operating system: Digital UNIX
    Release: V4.0
    Version: 878
    Architecture: alpha
    Platform name: AlphaServer 4X00 5/300 2MB
    Number of CPUs: 4
    CPU type number (/usr/include/machine/hal/cpuconf.h): 49
    CPU speed: 299 MHz
    Physical Memory: 512 MB
    Virtual Memory: 1922 MB
  • Your next available alternative from using Xeons is to use PentuimPros. I forget the chipset (it's not 440FX, it's whatever's after, and it's not very popular... 440GX?) There are 4-way PPro boards out there, but since your top speed is 4x200mhz, it's yet again hardly worth it.

    http://developer.intel.com should list the chipset, but good luck finding such a board on the open market.
  • ur not going to find a quad pentium two mother board, and if u do find one let me know.

    intel didn't design the pentuim II to be used in quad config, its only single or dual, the ones that do quad is the PPro , xeon, PIII, or PIIIxeon
  • it would be interesting to see what cpus us nerds will be looking into next, can it be amd or intel, only the poll will decide!!!
  • no it has to be even chips , the same reason there has to be even number of dram chips, its to fill up the bus, when u split something their is two ends, and both have to be filled in order to work, when going with more than one processor, u r esstentially splitting the cpu bus, and it has to fill both , and split it again and u get for, again and 8 and so forth
  • You can get slot adapters from Supermicro (and Tyan?) that will let you run slot1 CPUs in a slot2 motherboard. If you can get the quad-proc motherboard, that might be a solution for you.

    --Corey
  • The page of the guy who found out that the Celerons can be manipulated to do SMP is at

    http://www.kikumaru.com/ (in Japanese)

    Recently an English WebBoard has been added where Duaron (=Dual Celeron) people gather.

    I use a Celeron 300A x 2 machine running at 504MHz. Requires some cooling but runs great. I was one of those who drilled 0.5mm holes into the SCPP version Celeron and hotwired the whole thing with 1.5V. Was quite fun soldering a CPU.
    (The new PPGA are just too easy)





  • The AD450NX is bigger. :) Up to 8 Gigs of RAM, 12 SCSI-2 Hot-Swap bays, 6 32-bit PCI & 5 64-bit PCI...

    AD450NX [intel.com] link at developer.intel.com.

    These are REALLY stable SMP under Linux, and I cringe at running NT under ANY processor. (plus at 500Mhz they'll do 5 to 6Mkeys/s)

  • I don't think it's so much the chipset as the BREQ pins on the CPU itself. Physically, it's missing the pins on the CPU to do more than dual processor configs. The Celerons, being P2-based, have the pin necessary, it's just running at the wrong voltage levels, thus the soldering. If I had a couple hundred bucks burning a hole in my pocket, I'd try drilling and soldering a mobo for dual Celerons, but I'm not quite gutsy enough to start adding pin-outs and circuitry to them. :)

    In short, you couldn't get the extra BREQs for multiple processors without changing the entire CPU, and then you'd have to convince the Slot 1 that they were there.
  • First off, YOUR OFF TOPIC.

    Second, you didn't give enough info to evalute the
    problem...how much ram, what type of video card, etc, etc, etc....
  • Seems Seagate drives have been giving the rest of the fast bunch a bad rep.

    I've got a couple of 2.5gig Seagate Medalists at 5400rpm, which have always run hot enough that it's uncomfortable to place my hand on them for any length of time.

    On the other hand, I've also got three IBM 9ES drives (two 9.1's, one 4.5gig) at 7200rpm. None of them ever get anywhere beyond mildly warm, even when mounted in the same places as the aforementioned Seagates, under similar ambient conditions. (by mildly warm, I mean about the same temperature that an electric blanket might be comfortable at.)

    Methinks Seagate hasn't been doing many things right as of late if they can't make a fast drive which doesn't require supplemental cooling.
  • The Proliant 6000 comes in 2 flavors: up to 4-way PPros, or up to 4-way PII/PIII Xeons, not plain-vanilla PIIs. We have about 60 of them in 2 and 4-way PPro configuration.
  • No...the K7 will use its own interface, named slot A. This is not rumor, it is fact. AMD has been demonstrating some alpha K7s for a while now. Slot A has the same dimensions as slot 1, this was done to make it easier for motherboard manufacturers making slot 1 boards to transition to slot A boards. But slot A is not slot 1, or slot 2. It uses the Alpha's EV-6 bus. By the way, although the 21164 Alpha is a socket based chip, the 21264 uses the exact same slot A interface as the K7.
  • The K6 supports no SMP configuration at all. You're thinking of the K5, which did support OPIC, but was also completely unsupported by chipset makers.

    I think it was a poor design decision on AMD's part to pull OPIC from the K6 -- I suspect there would be enough user demand to get chipset folks like VIA to support it as a cost-effective alternative to P6 SMP.
  • I don't think it is possible to use the celerons in a dual configuration. I'm sure that intel has some connection in the chip that they can cut to make the celeron un smp-able. If people could run the celerons in dual mode, who would buy a regular pentium II. They have everyone shoehorned into exactly the market they want. Anyone know when I can get my hands on a motorola motherboard and chips, that are cheap and not apple affiliated.
    (comment on my spelling and I'll kick you in the teeeth.)
    josh
  • Where can I find a cheap quad PPro Mb at now. I have looked and the only one I found was over nine hundred dollars.(sorry don't remember where I saw it.)
  • I sit corrected, Is there anything special you have to do to get it up and running?
  • Hi, The part number you want is: MSI MS-6905. I just got two of them, but they only have an overclocking jumper on them, no SMP jumper. Have a look at: http://www.kikumaru.com/pc/s370tos1/index_e.html
    Which lays it all out nicely, and you only need to solder 1 wire.

    Shall let you all know how I get on with dual 366's!!

    Phil
  • 300A - not much cache but I dont have lot of green left.

    I may have these gusy actually build it and my new machines, If the price is right and they are willing to use my parts, and they'll warranty the system for X amount of days.
    I don't feel like another burn out.
    http://www.computernerd.com/future6.html

    If I actually end up chatting with them I'll ask about the 400. Thx


  • Yep, Yep, Yep -but only cause I try'd to run out of specs and didn't notice that it was that hot

    was running asus p2b-ds - board is hosed up now though, burn marks on the agp port and over to the pci, try'd throwing a pci video card in but didn't work.

    Have Two PII 333's both overclocked - 500mhz a piece - I did run for a little while at 112 bus, but not to long before I put it back down to 100 bus.

    have one scorched video card,at least its still live though and one dead one.

    I am planning on putting the 333 each in their own cheaper system(IDE) and using my current parts(UW SCSI) for a new dual celeron.

    I will be interested to see how well the clustering does.

    bitch,bitch,bitch moan....


  • That's BS. I have here next to me a quad pentium Pro ALR box, and although at the moment it only has 2 CPUs (PPro 166 512K oc'd to 200) I have run it with 1, 2, 3, and 4 processors. Works Great. My only complaint is that it must have (for performance better than EDO) memory added 8 simms at a time, and FPM parity simms (the only thing it takes) are about 2x SDRAM prices.
    It is cool, it has 7 PCI slots (2 independant PCI buses) 5 EISA, Two (2) 550watt power supplies [works fine if one fails, other than an annoying beeper] 6 slot SCA (hot swap [almost] SCSI slots).
    The whole thing is a rack mount and has 9 big fans.
    An interesting thing is the CPU clock jumpers, it allows you to clock a pentium pro at anything up to 366Mhz. I have had no trouble running 4 ppro 166's at 266 Mhz, but I normally run at 200. (800 bogomips) I would love to try 4 PentiumPro Overdrive chips in it (333Mhz Xeon that fits socket 8)

  • Performance scaling vs. Clustering (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Everybody seems to (whenever SMP comes up on
    Slashdot) answer with "it's neat, but you're
    better off just going with 2 1-cpu boxes."
    While it may be true that the cost is lower for
    just the CPU and motherboard, what about the cost
    of 2 40GB RAID arrays? (One for each server).
    And the hundreds of megabytes of memory for each
    server. Plus the pricey cases with LED displays
    on the front that show processor fan RPM and
    redundant power supplies. It certainly is
    cheaper to make 2 low-end boxes with just anything
    thrown in them, where the CPU is the only concern.
    But high-end servers (and I would assume a 4-way
    box, while not really high end, is certainly not
    end userish level) have a lot more hardware in
    them that's expensive than just the processor and
    motherboard..

    [if i posted more than once in a year i might
    make an account]
  • In order to run SMP, you have to recompile your kernel, but it's not an ordeal by any means. In the new 2.2 kernels, it's actually an option in make {X,menu}config. While generally speaking, SMP kernels will work on UP boxen, you're going to have some amount of overhead (probably no more than 30%), and so it's good to only compile SMP kernels on SMP boxen.
  • Maybe I would have to answer your question with a question, Why INTEL?

    If your using Windows NT, it probably won't see big gains, AFAIK, it's SMP isn't that great.

    If your using Linux (or another *NIX) then your dilluting yourself if your thinking about Quad PIII's insted of something like a SGI Origin, or a Sparc, or even an AIX box...

    I guess I don't see any reason to TRY to get a quad Intel box, so, that's probably why there aren't many.

  • Think about it +$30 for Dual MB and Cpu.

    +$30 for the board, then the new CPU. But, that's dual.

    We're talking quad, and quad boards AFAIK are rare, Xeon only, and in the $1,000+ not $100 area.

    Dual PII's fill the gap between Intel and "true workstation hardware" (forgive the term), but when you go to the quad price range, the tables turn.

  • That's my point. Quad's run very high. Intel has the edge for price/preformance on single CPU systems. By the time you spec out a loaded Pentium II thought, your in in the neighborhood of much more heavy duty systems.

    Plus, unfortunately, Intel systems don't seem to have the "lifetime" of Sun's, SGI's, IBM AIX, and DEC systems. I haven't seen many 5+ year old systems fail in that group. But, I have seen some pretty "dead" intel boxes scattered in the back rooms of labs.

    I suggest you price both systems before you buy... We just pulled in an Origin and an Octane at work, when initally we were just shopping for a Dual PII box. We priced the systems with what we would need, and it seemed that the SGI's were going to really thump the Intel's in that price range.

    Now, Dealing with IRIX as opposed to Linux, I would pick Linux 10 to 1 anyday. It's just plain easier to work with (system admin wise).

    But you really better get a good idea of what a Quad PIII like this guy was asking is going to cost before you say Intell is cheap. Let's look really fast at just this... Pricewatch (cheapest you will find a PIII CPU) shows lowest price on A PIII 500 at $634/each. That makes the total $2,536 for CPU's alone, not counting the motherboard, RAM, case, etc.. etc... And your not planning on stuffing this all in a $18 bargian basement case, are you? $100 for a case, probably $400-$600 for a mother board (IF you find one), $100 for a vid card, etc etc... Your talking about $3,000+ EASY, probably $4,000 easy.

    Then call SGI, Sun, IBM, and Alpha retailers, and see what you can get for the same money. Check Memory I/O, Mega/Giga-flops, SPECS, and I think you will see, we're not playing in Intel's field anymore.

    Aside from that, I would take the people mentioning that you can't do Quad PII or PIII seriously, unless it has been confirmed otherwise. I think the Xeon is the only one that might do Quad... If I am wrong on anything, it's that..

    But as for bang for the buck, Intel nicely fills the gap between AMD's and the Big Boy's in UNIX with it's Duals, but after that, it's out of it's league.

  • I totally agree... I was giving the lowest cost I could possably amagine, to make the point, it's still going to be in the SUN/SGI/DEC price range.

    Quad Intel is (IMHO) a very expensive way to go, and in this situation, it's hard to discuss, because the question never mentioned the use of the box, so I don't know if needing Intel is a consideration...

  • He DID say PII, and although I don't know if it's technically possable, a Quad Celeron overclocked would probably give a pretty good bang for the $, IF you can find a board that will do it for under $400.

    I have seen articals about a few tricks that are needed to make Celerons into Dual'able. So, that may be a bit of bang. But I don't know if it's possable HERE Pricewatch [pricewatch.com] shows it's dual boards, and they ain't cheap, and it seems only Xeon boards are listed.

    I would tend to say, go with the dual Celeron tricks if your very technically inclined, go with dual PII's if your not, and if you want more, look at non-Intel options.

    VA Research [varesearch.com] is definately going to be the place to go to see just how much you can get an Intel box to do. They are running at the commercial limits of possabilities with Intel systems. If they don't have it, I would be doubtfull of it's existance. But if you notice the prices (*Which are reasonable considering the quality of componants*), they start playing into the SUN/SGI price range with thier bigger systems.

  • I know the writer asked about Intel, so this is OT more than the AMD SMP (K7) posts, but as someone with one foot in both the x86 and PPC world just throught I'd drop this..

    Known fact: The PPC G3 (750) does not fully support SMP, there are cache issues. An exception is what the Amiga guys did with the 4way G3 box, but it's still a hack because the CPU doesn't fully exploit SMP (there are cache-related SMP instructions needed that are not there). FYI the G3 is based on a PPC 603e... a notebook chip, but this revision has really good integer (FP is decent... still stomps Intel tho).

    The G4, which is based on the PPC 604; both support what's needed for SMP. G4 is 64-bit - initially it will be configured with some compromises on the _motherboard_ so it's a "drop in" to G3 setups. Then there's AltiVec vector processing, 128-bit, which UNLIKE MMX can be executed in paralell with the FPU.

    FYI - if you can find multi-processor 604e Macs, like the 9600MP or a Daystay 4-way @ 200MHz, they're supposed to make bitchen Linux boxes. Or so I hear... *I* don't have one. :-/
  • intel didn't design the pentuim II to be used in quad config, its only single or dual, the ones that do quad is the PPro , xeon, PIII, or PIIIxeon

    Nuff said.

    Stan "Myconid" Brinkerhoff
  • The first real problem with cheap smp was solved when intel developed and patented APIC. This structure has half of the interrupt control needed on the cpu, half in the chipset or auxillary chip like the iS82093AA.

    Intel would not license this to AMD or Cyrix so they developed their own OpenPIC standard which the 6x86 and K5 supported. When AMD bought NexGen for their 6th generation design which evolved into the K6, it had no OpenPIC support and it wasn't worth the cost to add. Via did have OpenPIC support in atleast one version of chipset, but I never found a motherboard implementing SMP with it. Linux does indeed support OpenPIC SMP, but only on the PowerPC processors ( see linux/openpic.h). With only Cyrix having processor support for Openpic with the passing of the K5, and intel not letting anyone else make APIC compatible stuff, well, intel is the only SMP game for x86 systems. But OpenPIC was practical and robust enough for Motorola and IBM to make it a foundational part of the whole PowerPC line.

    Sad really when you look at the unrelenting control that intel uses on the PC industry to maintain an environment that suits their needs at the expense of everything else.
  • I priced this, and have kept up with it, and as a result, I have two PII/300's in my box . Quad CPU's are more expensive, but Duals aren't. When I bought this box (late August '98), all other componenets the same, the SMP mobo and two 300MHz chips was cheaper than a single processor board and a 400MHz chip.

    /me can't wait for SMP K-7 boards
  • I thought the PII only supported 2-way SMP.

    I was reading that SMP Celeron page, and based on what I learned about SMP there, it seems that the PII is only 2-way by design.

    True, some ugly hardware hacks on the motherboard could overcome that, but the performance would likely be less than wonderful.
  • Think of it this way:

    Pentium II is the follow-on to Pentium. It can't
    do more than 2-way MP because of the way it talks
    to its address bus and chipset.
    Pentium III is the follow-on to Pentium II, and has the same limitations.

    Pentium {II,III} Xeon is the follow-on to Pentium Pro. Pentium Pro can do 8-way MP because it was designed to access its bus and chipset in a more rational manner. Xeon carries much the same design forward, and so can do 8-way MP.

    --Corey

  • Wont find it - here's why: (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 07, 1999 @05:39PM (#1944534)
    To answer your question, yes, it is possible to have a four way SMP machine using the Pentium II processor but you wont find such a motherboard. The CPU is not the limiting factor, it's the motherboard "core logic" chipset. Quick review:

    Intel 440LX supports one or two Pentium II CPUs (slot 1) with a 66MHz front side bus. Chipset is features an SDRAM memory controller and a dual PCI bridge - one 33Mhz 32 bit PCI, and one 66Mhz 32 bit AGP with 2x mode.

    Intel 440BX supports one or two Pentium II CPUs (slot 1) with a 66 or 100MHz front side bus. Chipset features an SDRAM memory controller and a dual PCI bridge - one 33MHz 32 bit PCI, and one 66MHz 32 bit AGP with 2x mode.

    Intel 440NX supports up to eight Xeon CPUs (slot 2) with a 100MHz front side bus. Chipset features a four way interleaved SDRAM controller and a dual PCI bridge - one 66MHz 32 bit PCI, and one 33MHz 64 bit PCI. NO AGP!

    Now, the first two chipsets are the "cheap" consumer variety. The third chipset is the expensive server variety which is fairly obvious as it supports up to 8 CPUs, four way memory interleave, and offers a 64 bit PCI bus. The trade off is that you don't get an AGP slot - but that isn't needed on a server anyway. It's also intended for slot 2 (Xeon) CPU's. Now, technically, you could design a board with the NX chipset that supported 4 slot 1 CPUs - but there probably wouldn't be much of a market - and Intel doesn't want you to do that anyway. (They might not sell you the chipset at all if they thought you were going to use it for slot 1 designs.)

  • $4k for a good quad Sparc/Alpha/whatever? (Score:3)

    by Christopher Thomas ( 11717 ) on Thursday April 08, 1999 @09:17AM (#1944535)
    Then call SGI, Sun, IBM, and Alpha retailers, and see what you can get for the same money. Check Memory I/O, Mega/Giga-flops, SPECS, and I think you will see, we're not playing in Intel's field anymore.


    I studied these companies' offerings in detail about a month ago, when I wondered how much a really _good_ multiprocessor system costs.


    The answer is about $30k+ for something like a quad box, and about $100k+ for something with more respectable performance.


    I've heard people quote high single-digit $k for Alpha boxen, but I'm still suspicious as to what's on the motherboard.


    From what I found, both IBM and SGI had horrible price/performance ratios (for what I was looking for; my primary concern was FP performance). Sun systems were ok, but the real winner from what I could tell was HP. They sell PA-RISC 8500 boxen with large numbers of processors and respectable cache for a (relatively) reasonable price. They have a pricing sheet on their web site, though you have to dig a fair bit for it. Some of the manufacturers give Spec figures, but it's still a good idea to stop by spec.org to find out what the performance of some of the boxen listed actually ends up being.


    What I concluded from the survey was that I'm better off spending $10k (Canadian) and buying 15 K62-400 boxen. The problems that I want to solve are easily compartmentalized.

  • SMP vs Clustering (Score:3)

    by Christopher Thomas ( 11717 ) on Wednesday April 07, 1999 @05:09PM (#1944536)
    The main problem here is communications latency and bandwidth. In a SMP box, it's easy for the processors to communicate large amounts of data to each other and to have a fast communications response time. It's also (relatively) easy to perform shared memory accessing and to arbitrate memory locking.


    A cluster, OTOH, has to stuff all inter-processor communications through a network cable. This works quite well for easily compartmentalized problems that don't need much access to shared memory. However, if you had a large chunk of memory that you wanted each processor to be able to do more or less random locking, reading, and modification on, your network will go into meltdown. Especially if this memory is distributed over many boxes (i.e. each box contains a part of the very large whole instead of each box mirroring all of a smaller shared memory block).


    Myself, when I buy the machine of my dreams, I'll probably go the clustering route. There are plenty of problems that I'd like to play with that don't have unreasonable communications loads, and it is one heck of a lot cheaper to build a cluster for something like that than to pay through the nose for big iron (or even medium-sized aluminum).

  • chipset issue (Score:3)

    by IntlHarvester ( 11985 ) on Thursday April 08, 1999 @02:10AM (#1944537) Journal

    Note that you can buy a "Pentium Pro Overdrive" chip, which is essentially a 333Mhz Xeon that fits in a PPro socket.

    I doubt they're much cheaper than the regular Xeons, but you'd be able save some money on the motherboard.
    --

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