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Date:      Tue, 4 Feb 2003 22:25:57 +0200 (EET)
From:      Narvi <narvi@haldjas.folklore.ee>
To:        "Kurt J. Lidl" <lidl@pix.net>
Cc:        Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com>, <hackers@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: Lower power SMP boxes?
Message-ID:  <20030204222414.N43637-100000@haldjas.folklore.ee>
In-Reply-To: <20030201145121.B9269@pix.net>

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On Sat, 1 Feb 2003, Kurt J. Lidl wrote:

> On Sat, Feb 01, 2003 at 11:21:49AM -0800, Matthew Dillon wrote:
> > :On Sat, Feb 01, 2003 at 10:17:23AM +0100, Mats Larsson wrote:
> > :> Via just recently announced their new Nehemiah processor capable of smp,
> > :> presumably slow as its precursor but also the lowest power consuming
> > :> processor at the market (at least with standard socket fcpga motherboard)
> > :[...]
> > :> http://www.via.com.tw/en/viac3/c3.jsp
> > :
> > :It says "IO/APIC support in future versions".  So, it's not an SMP option
> > :today, as I understand it.
> > :
> > :-Kurt
> >
> >     Although, this is more a deficiency in the way FreeBSD is designed.  Using
> >     an APIC is nice, but not absolutely necessary.  All we need are good
> >     specs on how VIA's SMP cpus interact with each other and we could
> >     support it.
>
> How else are you going to do the physical interrupt steering?
> Unless they have gone through the effort of implementing a whole
> new and different steering mechanism -- which would fly in the face
> of having off-the-shelf OS support from the people in Redmond, at
> the very least.
>

At least at some point there was a thing called OpenPIC which the then big
two alternative x86 processor vendors AMD and Cyrix promised to support.
In practice I believe it ever only got used on one or two PPC boards.

> >     I like the 11 watts specified in the paper.  That *is* low power for
> >     the class of system they are selling.  I don't see a clock specification
> >     but I assume it is going to be at least as fast as the ~900MHz M-9000.
>
> It says "the new generation VIA C3 processor is available at speeds starting
> at 1GHz" in the paragraph under "Enhanced Digital Media Performance".
>
> -Kurt
>
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