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Subject: Re: I mean affordable SMP!

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 15:01:28 03/12/00

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On March 12, 2000 at 17:03:53, Tom Kerrigan wrote:

>On March 11, 2000 at 09:01:19, Vincent Lejeune wrote:
>
>>>EV6 is both good and bad.  Good for performance.  bad for price.  it is a 256
>>>bit bus.  Which is not cheap, from a memory point of view...
>>>
>>>Supposedly the athlon is pin-compatible with an alpha, at least that was the
>>>original promise, so the el-cheapo machine could be built based on the athlon,
>>>but when performance was needed, the athlon could be replaced with a real
>>>21264 (or higher) alpha chip to really go fast.
>>
>>The athlon is pin-compatible as promised but it is "not electrically compatible"
>>with the alpha processors , as it was said since the biginning of the
>>developpement of the Athlon. According this, there's NO motherboard where could
>>plug an athlon or a alpha, and I bet there will be not one, because the 2
>>products don't target the same users : Ahtlon for home/office automation and
>>Alpha for workstations/research computers/university
>
>I was pretty sure that pin-compatible meant electrically compatible. Otherwise
>AMD wouldn't make such a big deal about having processors that are
>pin-compatible with Intel. The whole deal with the AMD 486, K5, etc. was that
>they could be dropped into Intel mobos.
>
>I was also pretty sure that one of the reasons why the Athlon uses the EV6 bus
>is to make EV6 hardware cheap, so Alpha systems would become cheaper, and people
>would buy lots of Alphas to upgrade their Athlons...
>
>-Tom


That was my original thought/hope when I first saw the AMD announcement on
EV6 compatibility.  I can't imagine a cpu chip that is compatible with the EV6
but which won't replace an alpha or vice-versa...  IE both plug into the same
socket, interface with the same bus.  Would seem (to me) that they would both
be compatible replacements for each other...???



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