From owner-freebsd-smp Mon Apr 28 10:20:06 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id KAA25840 for smp-outgoing; Mon, 28 Apr 1997 10:20:06 -0700 (PDT) Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.50]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id KAA25773 for ; Mon, 28 Apr 1997 10:20:01 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id KAA02093; Mon, 28 Apr 1997 10:17:05 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199704281717.KAA02093@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: Quad Pro 150 motherboard? To: black@zen.cypher.net (Ben Black) Date: Mon, 28 Apr 1997 10:17:05 -0700 (MST) Cc: kory@avatar.com, brownie@earthling.net, csubl@csv.warwick.ac.uk, smp@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: from "Ben Black" at Apr 27, 97 10:40:57 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-smp@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > and the point is that quad CPU boards are expensive because the demand > for them as anything but servers (and as servers too, really) IS ALMOST > NONEXISTENT. look at all the extra costs of going from 2 to 4 CPUs on a > board: you can't fit all 4 on the mainboard, so dauthercards are > required, all schemes for this are proprietary. > > so whether or not *you* can use it is not the issue. the fact is you are > greatly in the minority and you know it. think of yourself as the > exception that proves the rule. The PPro's are stackable without additional electronics external to the processor. This makes it a *lot* easier to do multiple CPU's up to large numbers. Personally, I'd like a 32 processor machine; of course, that means fixing the kernel so that it doesn't bog down on interprocessor synchronization, starting with the allocation mechanism and a hierarchical lock manager. My goal would be to have incremental compiles going on in edit sessions so that when I was done editing, the code was read to run. I hate this "wait for the compile" BS. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.