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 > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
