Question about newer dual/quad cpu server mobo's

[mooseracing]

I was looking at building a new workhorse and looking at socket 940/939/AM2 stuff and I was wondering if the boards are like the old ones where you had to place a terminator in teh empty CPU sockets to get it to boot or it could boot with just a single spu and no troubles.

 

[Peter]

AMD's architecture never had common busses for more than one CPU, so no terminators were needed there, ever.

With the HyperTransport architecture (K8 and now K10), the question is, does the particular mainboard design connect some of the I/O to the 2nd CPU, or is it all on the 1st one? If the latter, then yes, you can run the thing with one CPU - you just have to leave the DIMM sockets on the 2nd socket empty. If it's more of a high performance board that spreads the I/O load across multiple HT links, then an empty CPU socket will also lose you some of the I/O.