On Mon, 19 Jul 1999, Charles P. Provencher wrote:
> As I have sadly discovered recently (see dicussion "ALR Revolution Q-SMP"
> on 1999/07/15) on X86 there practically only is Intel that is the
> standard for SMP.
Technically, that is true, but there are quite a lot of operating
systems that support those diverse standards.
As bizzare as that may seem, NT and SCO UNIX are two that support quite a
range of different systems. True, they need specalised kernels for it, but
at least they are available.
This is not to say anything against Linux - it is still the most widely
used OS on my network, but this is one of it's shortcommings. OTOH, to be
fair, with SMP support, it probably supports 99% of the systems used
anyway, so exotic hardware is an exception, rather than the rule...
> There is another standard but no X86 motherboard manufacturer supports it.
There are several, actually, but they are bizzare enough that I don't even
know what they are called...
> I had been told that maybe the AMD K6-III might try to emulate the Intel
> APIC, but I got the confirmation that AMD has not followed through on
> this experiment.
Similar rumors have been circling around ever since the appearance of K6
CPUs, but they have always been unfounded. While K6 might support
multi-processor configurations, no motherboard known to be exists that can
use this. And besides, with enough external logic, you can make anything
capable of multi-processor setups - it's just a matter of cost, really,
which is in the case unjustified for most people...
HTH,
Gordan
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