From owner-freebsd-smp Tue Apr 29 13:55:26 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id NAA09560 for smp-outgoing; Tue, 29 Apr 1997 13:55:26 -0700 (PDT) Received: from Ilsa.StevesCafe.com (Ilsa.StevesCafe.com [205.168.119.129]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id NAA09542 for ; Tue, 29 Apr 1997 13:55:20 -0700 (PDT) Received: from Ilsa.StevesCafe.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by Ilsa.StevesCafe.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id OAA00593; Tue, 29 Apr 1997 14:54:53 -0600 (MDT) Message-Id: <199704292054.OAA00593@Ilsa.StevesCafe.com> X-Mailer: exmh version 2.0gamma 1/27/96 From: Steve Passe To: Poul-Henning Kamp cc: brownie@earthling.net, smp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Quad Pro 150 motherboard? In-reply-to: Your message of "Tue, 29 Apr 1997 09:12:21 +0200." <1511.862297941@critter> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Tue, 29 Apr 1997 14:54:53 -0600 Sender: owner-smp@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Hi, > Well, I talked to a couple of people who did speak for Intel, they said > that it was close to impossible to get four PP to work on a "plain" > PC motherboard, you would have to do the daughterboard+buffer thing... > > The reasons stated was "termal, electrical & practical"... I'm willing to accept this as fact. But I don't think it justifies the $900+ that AMI gets for their CPU daughtercards! Unfortunately the tail wags the dog here. Bean-counters crunch numbers and say: It will cost us $X to engineer/start manufacturing of this product. If we sell 1,000 of them this would be $X1 per unit. If we sell 1,000,000 of them this would be $X2 per unit. We *THINK* demand would be Y units given these 2 prices (and other factors). We will sell the units at price $Z based on the above facts. So in the case of 4-CPU motherboards it appears the bean-counters have decided there isn't enough demand to justify setting up for large volume and lower unit price. So the boards are too expensive for most of us. So most of us can't buy one. I submit that if someone designed a good 4-CPU P6 motherboard that sold in the $600-800 range (dual P6 boards are $260-360) it would become quite popular once the prices of P6 settle a little more (is the klammoth available yet?). -- Steve Passe | powered by smp@csn.net | Symmetric MultiProcessor FreeBSD