how difficult would this be?

[jhu]

what's the feasibility of making a motherboard that can support different types of processors? maybe something that has a p4 socket and a g4/g5 slot? don't want a p4, then just buy a g4 card from apple and stick it in the machine.

 

[Turkey]

Pretty hard I think unless VIA, SiS, or nVidia came out with autosensing mb components... otherwise you would have to separate the PCI controller and PCI slots and put them on one board, then have a connector that would basically connect to the rest of the board, ie the expensive parts. It would be roughly equivalent to saying "I don't want this car anymore, keep the interior and replace the rest of the car." I don't know that much about motherboards though.

 

[Moohooya]

Technically possible, but however the cost would be so high, people would buy two seperate mobo's rather than the one.

Apple used to do this many years ago, have an *ntel daughter card to speed up x86 code. If you wanted both at the same time (as Apple did) then people will pay. If it is an either/or, currently people will make the decission beforehand and save their money in the home computer market.

However... As speeds get fater, performance less important, it is possible that perhaps one day in the future we will see this. If I can build a board that will run at 99% of a dedicated AMD or *ntel board, for a few cents per board extra, then it could make sense. Fewer parts to stick, fewer boards to support etc, all ends in savings, perhaps even giving the enduser a better price

 

[Locutus4657]

You're better off just buying which ever platform you prefer, then emmulating the platform you only need occational support for... For instance, I have an AMD Athlon 800MHz, which is fast enough to emmulate a fairly modern PPC and be resnobly fast doing so. So if I absolutly wanted MacOS for whatever reason, all I need to do is purchace some software that acts as a layer between MacOS and the hardware and just install MacOS. I know such software exists though the name escapes me now, the only hitch might be you need a MacBIOS for whatever era PPC you want to emmulate, they do sell ISA cards that you can plug into your computer for this purpouse, however last I heard they didn't have PCI cards yet... I'm sure as time goes on the emmulated hardware layer will get more and more sophisticated, possibly even to the point that it can fake your AGP and NVidia Geforce 3 as the mac counter parts (not too technically difficult once you've done everything else). And I'm sure they'll come out with PCI BIOS cards sooner or later.

Carlo



<< what's the feasibility of making a motherboard that can support different types of processors? maybe something that has a p4 socket and a g4/g5 slot? don't want a p4, then just buy a g4 card from apple and stick it in the machine. >>

 

[corkyg]

Think two separate computers linked with a KVM switch. Cheaper and proven.