Re: vsta on biprocessors pentium

[basile@soleil.serma.cea.fr (Basile STARYNKEVITCH) writes:]

>Some manufacturers are making biprocessors pentium 90 motherboards.
>I'm considering buying such a thing.
>Does it make sense?
>Are such motherboards useable?

I'm told (by friends in the PC system business) that the current breed of
dual-Pentium motherboards are pretty bad. Some of them which have come out
in the last month or two are better.

>Can VSTa be easily adapted to biprocessor operations?

Yes. It's a simple matter of programming. :-)

>Can these motherboards run (in monoprocessor mode) popular OSes such
>as Linux?

I understand that one of the CPUs remains offline until you take a
particular action.

>Does anyone have hints, feature to check (eg cache consistency between
>both processors), motherboard brands to avoid, etc?

You want a coherent physical cache if at all possible. Bus snooping is higly
desirable, otherwise you have to be shooting down cache lines as you do DMA.

I'll try and ping my friends about particular brands.

                                                Andy
Received on Thu Feb 16 16:03:36 1995