Reply 30900 of 30920, by BitWrangler
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Ozzuneoj wrote on 2026-03-03, 11:09:Anyway, I have always remembered that this system was equipped with dual Socket 370 Celeron Mendocino processors, but it JUST hit me like five minutes ago that this is actually really unusual, and I have not come across any boards like that in the 10+ years I have been buying old hardware.
I googled it and found this wikipedia article about the Abit BP6 and, sure enough, this was a really unique setup and the Celeron was never intended for SMP. I don't know if that's the board he had or if it was something different, but... man. I think I still have the processors, but I had basically no room to keep anything at that point in my life so I definitely didn't keep that computer around for long. I have no idea where it ended up exactly.
Add that board to the list of neat stuff that I should have held onto...
Yeah there was a bit of a fad in overclocker/enthusiast circles for the dual celeron setups in late 90s into 00. Intel didn't fully cripple the mendocinos SMP capability, but it needed either a socket mod and BIOS hack to get the cellys on a dual PII/PIII board, or slotket with dual capability, or the very rare boards that did it plug and play, but I think it invited sanctions from Intel so not many were around. This is an area of interest that suffers from loss of contemporary knowledge because forum posts were on server side scripts, generated on the fly and all old posts were lost when sites went to vBulletin etc and archive.org didn't effectively scrape them. We should have a name for that, turn of century perlpocalypse or something. You still find some mentions on the earliest preserved pages of ocforums, hardocp forums etc, there might be something in the overclockers article section about it or on tomshardware archives.
Then after 00 when single CPU ghz got real, users had probably powerleaped, LinLin-ed or used other adapters to get dual Tualatin on the boards, Pentium only, Intel had SMP properly crippled on celerons from coppermine.
However, the AMD camp had a go around with the cheap dually, when the Duron Morgan core launched and dual socket A boards could run them, so a renaissance of that type of giantkiller with dual cheap CPU came back with 1 to 1.3 Ghz Durons. (Think there might have been a bridge mod needed on the Duron)
Edit: I think the duallys weren't terribly useful to anyone other than NT or Linux wonks, or those with real workloads, until Win2k came along and made it more half consumer-y and halflife/UT etc ran on it.
Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.
