Date: Mon, 12 May 1997 00:32:34 -0700 From: "Michael L. VanLoon -- HeadCandy.com" <michaelv@MindBender.serv.net> To: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> Cc: chuckr@mat.net, smp@csn.net, james@westongold.com, smp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: maptable of SuperMicro P6DNH Message-ID: <199705120733.AAA22695@MindBender.serv.net> In-Reply-To: Your message of Sat, 10 May 97 12:07:37 -0700. <199705101907.MAA04249@phaeton.artisoft.com>
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>> >> Seriously, the MP boards are typically *better* than the UP boards
>> >> because they have more hurdles. The UP boards *should* jump the same
>> >> hurdles -- it would make for faster UP boards, for one thing, and
>> >> faster generic OS code, for another. I'm surprised there isn't a
>> >> push for this from MS on the basis of NT... heck, maybe there is?
>> And it would make the hardware more expensive. And people wouldn't
>> buy it. Then you would have SCSI and IDE in motherboard designs.
>And then they'd move it into the "board chipset" ASIC's. And then,
>since silicon real-estate is silicon real-estate, no matter if you
>encode shiity designs or good designs in the dopant, it will cost the
>same per square millimeter for bot good and bad hardware.
[...]
>Why does everyone think "better" means "more silicon". If programmers
>thought you had to go bigger to get better, then we'd have... well,
>MS-NT and USL-SVR4. 8-).
Well, in that case, this has already happened at least once. Remember
the days when the 486 reigned as king, and you were rolling the dice
picking up an EISA or PCI (or VLB) motherboard, whether its cache
coherency was functional, or totally inept.
Then, a few good chipsets started to emerge. Intel being one (after
they sorted out the bugs in the first couple tries).
Then, the Pentium came along, and Intel used that as an opportunity to
start pushing its own chipsets hard. The argument whether its good or
not that the majority of the industry is centered around Intel parts
aside, the move to almost all Intel support chip based motherboards
has, in general, substantially increased at least the consistency of
functional motherboards, if not the overall quality.
The fact that Intel put so much SMP capability directly into the
Pentium Pro, also bodes well in this direction. Dual CPU is now
almost free, except for the extra CPU. It's quite possible that four
to eight CPUs for almost free is just down the road. Maybe we just
haven't topped the cost/production efficiency curve for that yet.
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Michael L. VanLoon michaelv@MindBender.serv.net
--< Free your mind and your machine -- NetBSD free un*x >--
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NetBSD ports in progress: PICA, others...
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