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Subject: Re: I mean affordable SMP!

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 19:42:10 03/12/00

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On March 12, 2000 at 20:07:03, Vincent Lejeune wrote:

>On March 12, 2000 at 18:01:28, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>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...???
>
>I've read the opposite in an article about the Athlon : The Athlon is "not
>electrically compatible" with the alpha processors !
>Now, more investigation will confirm or annul this statement ...
>I've no time to invest in this search but if someone could, he would bring the
>truth
>Thanks in advance ;)


I will certainly look around to see what I can uncover...



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