Thus spake D. R. Evans ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): > On 5 Feb 02, at 12:52, Ric Tibbetts wrote: > > > I beg to differ with you. > > I have a Dell PowerEdge Server sitting right next to me. It is running > > dual Intel PII processors. To get it working as SMP, I had to order a > > matched set of processors. I tried it with un-matched sets, and it wouln't > > recognize both procs. > > > > That's not myth, it's experience. > > > > At the risk of sounding trite, that makes sense. After all, doesn't the > "S" in "SMP" stand for "Symmetric"?
Yes, but that's in contrast to asymmetric multiprocessing systems (quite common in mainframe days) in which there was 1 master cpu and 1 or more slaves. Typically (this was certainly true of the Honeywell 6000s I worked on in the 1970s) only the master cpu could handle interrupts. On an SMP system all cpus are created equal in that sense - no one of them is in overall control. It may very well be a chipset limitation that has led to Ric's experience; I can't think of anything *in principle* which says you couldn't build an SMP system out of cpus with different clock speeds, but I suspect that putting them on the same motherboard (certainly *not* a factor in mainframe days) might well pose almost insuperable difficulties. -- |Deryk Barker, Computer Science Dept. | Music does not have to be understood| |Camosun College, Victoria, BC, Canada| It has to be listened to. | |email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | |phone: +1 250 370 4452 | Hermann Scherchen. |
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
