First post, by Alahndro
Hy vogons,
I often come across your boards and read about the fun of tinkering with hardware and computers. This is a fine place and a great community!
Let me introduce myself:
I'm love to tinker with any kind of technology that works and interacts and also to learn about it.
My main fun PC consists of a dual P3-700 onside a ASUS P2B-DS.
Connected are f.e. an 4G IDE Stramer, 72GB DAT Streamer (scsi), CD and DVD-RW drives, 3,5 and 5,25 and 120M floppy, Zip-parallel drive via ISA-LPT adapter card, ISA ISDN Card to fiddle with my self-generated ISDN-system and a lot more. Dual-head setup conneted to a nvidia 6200 AGP card.
Main Storage is a 64GB SSD Disk-On-Module sitting on a Via-6421 based pci-card, that I made bootable myself by fixing its onboard fake eeprom (but that'll be another story).
Installed OSes are ReactOS, XP, Win7. Yeah I'm a hardware tester for ReactOS (just query my username there)
So and now comes my Idea for an CPU adapter to revive old motherboards. I'm hoping to raise a discussion for it and maybe even find some pal's to help build it if possible:
You noticed the maximum OS currently is Win7 and even that has become quite problematic due to M$ arrogant behavior of outputting new updates without checking if the CPU is capable of their fucking lazy programmers code requiring SSE2.
Yeah I'm quite angry about that! I mean I could accept it if they'd admit their too lazy or greedy to support old and perfectly working PCs. PCs and Laptops I like not just for their inner values! But the recommended settings for updates will just cripple any old machine into a black screen.
And no SSE2 for old cpus and boards. I want to change that! Why are there no more cpu adapter cards like in the good old times?
I wondered if there'd be some kind of compatibility that might make that possible. And I think I found one:
Recently I've read the datasheet of the Atom N270 cpu when I stumbled over its interface specs:
The logic is AGTL+. You know which other famous CPU has AGTL+: yeah P3-Tualatin!
I then remmebered the old slot1-T adapter that made it possible to put tualatins into slot1, and that they contained bus-transceivers to adapt the different bus voltages of AGTL+ and AGTL thats used for prior P3s. So lets compare the specs of a P3 and an Atom cpu. It has:
32 address lines
64 data lines
clock input for 100 or 133 MHz
various control signals, like reset , power ok, bus request and ack, etc etc.
The most important diff is that the bus speed is quad pumped compared to the old P3. But checking the atom-pins we find a few data strobes for the address and data lines needed to sync the transmission. These are INPUT signals that get issued by the north bridge! Thinking about it, it gets clear they run quad-pumped too, but do they REALLY NEED TO? What if we derive these strobe from the master clock and underclock the bus transciever logic of the atom cpu so it gets compatible with the old northbridge?
Computers in the end is just a matter of setting the address and read or write data. nothing more, nothing less. (And everyone saying ISA cards can't operate in Win7 just doesn't understand this simple fact!)
I think it'd be possible to built a slot-1 pcb that contains the atom cpu, the bus transceiver and of course the dc-dc converter to supply the rather low power needed for the atom. Of course me might arise a few problems from the bios but that too is not unfixable! (At least easier that getting the source code of windows so we could modify it to run without SSE2)
VOILA! We could get a SSE2+ cpu running onboard an P2/3 motherboard.
I know I'm a litte crazy for that idea...
(Heck, we could even place mutliple atom cpu's onto one slot 1 pcb cause agtl-bus is a parellel one. read it up!)
