Re: Enabling my second CPU

Hi,

Actually this might have been an XP, but I was of the impression that
the XPs always had this 'fake' speed identifier attached to them (or
non-fake, depending how you see that particular issue)? In any case it's
a 1.4ghz, and it's marked/marketed as a 1.4ghz .. Quite possibly a
Palomino, dmesg says

CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) processor (1400.06-MHz 686-class CPU)
   Origin = "AuthenticAMD"  Id = 0x644  Stepping = 4
Features=0x183fbff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,MMX,FXSR>
   AMD Features=0xc0440000<RSVD,AMIE,DSP,3DNow!>

To me it looks like a Thunderbird actually, but I'm not sure how I can
be certain of that.

The interesting thing is that the company I work for has had several
servers running with that Asus board and exactly these CPUs, and they
have all performed well (and some still do), some are still there and
some are sold/moved/disassembled.

I would never come to the idea of complaining about AMD or anyone else
when I try to use equipment in ways it was not meant to/certified to,
but given that these CPUs have worked fine in an SMP configuration
before and that the economy is a bit tight these days, I'm very keen to
give it a try anyway. So be it if it should turn out not to work - I'm
not going to start calling anyone bad names for that reason, I'll
probably just trod off and buy myself a new single-CPU board.

The only thing that annoys me slightly is that MSI sells their board as
an 'overclockers board', and even talks and explains proudly and in
detail about its overclocking capabilities in the printed manual. So
they seem perfectly willing to let people go beyond the specs of their
CPUs in that respect. Then why, oh why, do they keep me from even
attempting to use my Athlons in an MP configuration? Bit illogical, that. ;)

/Eirik

David O'Brien wrote:
> On Wed, May 05, 2004 at 10:04:31AM +0200, Eirik Oeverby wrote:
> 
>>I've recently changed from an Asus A7M266-D board to a MSI K7D Master-L 
>>board, due to the Asus dying on me. I'm running with dual Athlon 1.4ghz 
>>CPUs (non-MP, just plain old Athlon CPUs), and with the Asus this was no 
>>problem at all. Performance was fine, both CPUs were utilized well, and 
>>all was good.
>>Now with the MSI board, the BIOS complains on bootup that the CPUs I'm 
>>using aren't MP-capable, and that it has disabled one and is running in 
>>UNIprocessor mode.
> 
> 
> You were very, very lucky this worked at all.  You say "plain old
> Athlon", not "Athlon XP".  This implies Thunderbird, which really didn't
> support SMP and I'm very surprised it worked at all in the Asus board.
> Are you sure you don't mean "Athlon XP" (Palomino or newer)?
> 
> The reason your BIOS is complaining is that non-MP Athlon's aren't
> guaranteed to work in an SMP configuration.  If you sampled 10 Athlon
> XP's of them, I guaranteed some of them wouldn't work in SMP mode.  Athlon
> MP CPU's are fully tested, QA'ed, and certified to run *reliably* in SMP
> mode and configurations.  If AMD didn't have these checks put into the
> BIOS, and you used two XP's that wouldn't work together you'd call AMD
> CPU's "crap" and be all pissed.
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