From owner-freebsd-hardware Thu May 23 16:47:47 1996 Return-Path: owner-hardware Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id QAA05869 for hardware-outgoing; Thu, 23 May 1996 16:47:47 -0700 (PDT) Received: from GndRsh.aac.dev.com (GndRsh.aac.dev.com [198.145.92.241]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id QAA05861 for ; Thu, 23 May 1996 16:47:40 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from rgrimes@localhost) by GndRsh.aac.dev.com (8.6.12/8.6.12) id QAA17531; Thu, 23 May 1996 16:47:24 -0700 From: "Rodney W. Grimes" Message-Id: <199605232347.QAA17531@GndRsh.aac.dev.com> Subject: Re: AMD's K5 processor in SMP applications? To: jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) Date: Thu, 23 May 1996 16:47:24 -0700 (PDT) Cc: hardware@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <4431.832889982@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at "May 23, 96 03:19:42 pm" X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL11 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hardware@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > When you stock, say, an ASUS P54NP4 motherboard with two pentium > processors It's my understanding that you have to buy one "master" and > one slave CPU from Intel, you can't just buy two of the same P5 parts > and drop them in. I've never actually populated such a board myself > (they were already done by our boxshifter) so I don't know for _sure_, > but that's my understanding. In the early steppings of the Intel A80502 chip the SMP support did not work correctly, with those chips you had to specifically order the correct S-Spec number to get the primary and secondary CPU. This was all corrected at manufacturing mask set C, stepping 5 or latter of the CPU chips. For the above ASUS PCI/X-P54NP4 (X is either E or I depeding on Eisa Or Isa) boards any pair of stepping 5 or higher chips will work fine. > Now I'm wondering - if I wanted to use the K5 in the same application > for reasons of cost, would I be screwed? I've looked through AMD's > product line and I see no indication of whether or not the AMD chips > are SMP capable. I haven't got any clues on the K5 stuff... you should probably call ASUS and AMD technical support on that one. -- Rod Grimes rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com Accurate Automation Company Reliable computers for FreeBSD