Has anyone tried putting a pair of k6,k6-ii or k6-iii in a dual socket 7 motherboard?
I don't ever recall this being done nore do I ever recall anything starting that the k6 can't do smp.
Would be cool to see how they preform off they work in a dual CPU box.
K6 never supported the Intel APIC scheme and no S7 motherboards came out supporting OpenPIC.
All hail the Great Capacitor Brand Finder
I once stuck a k6-2 into a board that not only stated that no amd cpu's were supported , but also didn't even support the correct voltage , but it worked , and it was faster than any of the offical supported cpu's. Only way to know is just try it and see what happens it'll either work or it won't.
If I had the motherboard I'd try.
I tried 2x Kingston Turbochip 366 (K6-2 366) in my Tyan Tomcat S1562 with no success. One was ok, but two didnt work.
If I had a dual socket 7 board I would have tried it long ago...but alas I haven't seen one at a price I could tolerate in years.
The better question is why aren't you using four Pentium Pros? For the ultimate, nothing ever is going to use this, retro build.
I can understand the want to put a load of old CPUs on a board, but there is no practical reason to do so.
Nothing up until the 21st century really used multi-threading for anything other than server and heavy workstation needs. You definitely won't find any games to take advantage of it, and you will also need to use the NT Kernel, so most DOS games are out the window unless you dual boot.
If you want a multi-CPU machine with purpose, get something a bit newer, among the Pentium 4 era of CPUs. That's when multiple threads started to actually do something in gaming, and where DOS was just something the OG VOGONS users squabbled about.
wrote:K6 never supported the Intel APIC scheme and no S7 motherboards came out supporting OpenPIC.
This,
Unfortunately there is no chance to make work two K6 togheter.
It would be pretty interesting to see how they can behave though, performance per Mhz is very impressive if you consider a K6-III+ overclocked at 600Mhz.
Openpic standard has never been adopted AFAIK.
wrote:I can understand the want to put a load of old CPUs on a board
The main reason is that it is cool to do so. Just think how high-end that machine would be in its times. And it would be much more usable from today's point of view.
I like to run old software (including games) on modern computers, but also software as-new-as-possible on as-old-as-possible hardware.
Of course it's impractical. Doesn't have to be 😉
We all like to build implausibly high-spec retro machines, even period-correct ones. Because we can now, and perhaps we couldn't back then.
A supercomputer is high end, and can compute way faster than your machine, but they are often built using POWER chips, and are thus useless to anybody.
Having 2+ CPUs or threads on a Pre Pentium 4 machine is useless. Nothing will ever use it ever. The only reason to make one is if you find the parts on the cheap.
wrote:Having 2+ CPUs or threads on a Pre Pentium 4 machine is useless. Nothing will ever use it ever. The only reason to make one is if you find the parts on the cheap.
Q3A and all if not most ID tech3 games, Falcon4, Flight Simulator 2000, I believe older version of Deep Fritz engine have SMP support? multi tasking? Let on cpu run the OS and background tasks wile the other runs your game. Retro Game server? Or just a plain Retro server. Competitive benchmarking?
I guise having two CPU's with tasks like these aren't useful at all.
wrote:A supercomputer is high end, and can compute way faster than your machine, but they are often built using POWER chips, and are thus useless to anybody.
Having 2+ CPUs or threads on a Pre Pentium 4 machine is useless. Nothing will ever use it ever. The only reason to make one is if you find the parts on the cheap.
Back in college I used a dual P-III machine as my main workstation. It was running Linux.
