Would it be possible to 'mix' AMD chips and Intel chips?

[Hawk989s]

What I mean, is, would it be technically possible to construct a motherboard that had dual CPU slots, one for an Athlon, and one for a Pentium, that could I don't know, communicate with each other. This way you could get the best of both worlds. *shrug* I don't know what I'm talking about

 

[Peter]

Design a chipset that has a CPU bus for each of those, and you're in.

 

[glugglug]

Back in the Pentium days they could have made a dual socket 7 mobo that could take both a Pentium and a K6.

The Athlon uses a completely different bus from P3 or P4, so it would be a lot more complicated. Probably more complicated than making 8-way systems when standard intel chipsets only support 4-way (so you essentially have 2 4-way machines talking to each other in an 8-way system).

From a hardware perspective, an Athlon/DEC Alpha system would be simpler than an Athlon/P4 system, but from a software perspective it would be a mess to get the operating system to work with different instruction sets simultaneously.

 

[Peter]

Umm no they couldn't have - simply because K6 doesn't support dual processor setups.

 

[Shalmanese]

Not at the same time.

 

[Woodchuck2000]

Originally posted by: Hawk989s
What I mean, is, would it be technically possible to construct a motherboard that had dual CPU slots, one for an Athlon, and one for a Pentium, that could I don't know, communicate with each other. This way you could get the best of both worlds. *shrug* I don't know what I'm talking about

I'm not sure how you could define 'the best of both worlds' either - Apart from slight boosts in certain applications, there'd be no advantage unless you could get them to run in SMP mode... Which would be good for a laugh

 

[d00m]

Ideally, somone would design a CPU wich combines the low-latency of Athlon chips and the heavy-weight processing of Pentium chips

 

[Zuph]

Originally posted by: glugglug
Back in the Pentium days they could have made a dual socket 7 mobo that could take both a Pentium and a K6.

No they didn't. Back in those days, AMD and Intel used the same socket for both their chip, because AMD licensed it from intel (I think). AMD then branched off from intel, because it would have been too much trouble to design their chip being limited to the technology that intel produced.

 

[JHutch]

Umm no they couldn't have - simply because K6 doesn't support dual processor setups.

Actually, it did. It just wasn't the same standard Intel used and no one ever made a chipset that supported it.

JHutch

 

[Peter]

Originally posted by: JHutch

Umm no they couldn't have - simply because K6 doesn't support dual processor setups.

Actually, it did. It just wasn't the same standard Intel used and no one ever made a chipset that supported it.

JHutch

No it didn't. The K5 did support the OpenPIC standard for dual processing, so did the Cyrix 6x86. As noone bothered make chipsets for this, support for it was dropped from K6 and MII alike.

 

[JHutch]

I stand corrected. That's what I get for not double checking and relying on my (aging) memory.

JHutch

 

[Mrpilot007]

Is that memory DDR or SIMM?

 

[sao123]

no. It isnt possible because even though the machine instructions are the same for the processors,
the microinstruction steps and synchronization of reads/writes is not the same.
the microinstructions and read write sync, is what makes AMD a low latency chip and Intel the powerhouse processor.
You cant have both, just one or the other.

Sum it up like this...

Either do more work per step (more power improved computational power + each instruction takes longer means more wait between instructions for read/write), or do more steps(low latency improves cpu read/write wait time + more steps to perform the same calculation slows down complex instructions) Trying to do both at the same time produces syncronization problems.

 

[ReiAyanami]

Would it be possible to 'mix' AMD chips and Intel chips?

anything's possible with duct tape...

 

[kazeakuma]

I think it would be possible to have a board that supports both chips. It'd be one big board though, although I doubt you will get them to run simultaneously or in SMP mode. Anyone remember the Apples from the mid 90's that had a x86 chip on an expansion board? You could either boot them into DOS mode and use the 486 chip or boot up into the MacOS and use it like a normal mac. It was incredibly expensive though, because there was 2 sets of memory for each and 2 memory controllers. They were able to use the same storage system though, and I think aside from the memory, everything else in the system was shared. Couldn't see the point in doing this with current AMD/Intel chips as what's the point of having 2 x86 cpus that will essentially do the same thing but can't run at the same time. Maaaybe if you want to be really uber like, you could think about it with the Athlon64 and P4. But then, I really don't think you'll ever get them to operate simultaneously which kinda negates the point of having 2 cpus on one board.

 

[Demon-Xanth]

I had wondered about the ability to do this with multiple platforms in a cluster style computer. It'd be much like having a video card as a vector signal processor (since they really kick ass at that)

 

[davesaudio]

like when you had an original 8086 PC and bought an accerator card
which was a complete 286system on an ISA card and just used the 8086 board for I/O?

 

[ProviaFan]

I've heard of some expansion devices that allow an x86 processor and RAM to be put in a Sun SPARC architecture system; this apparently allowed one to run Windows in a "box" under Solaris.

 

[Ulfwald]

I may be wrong on this, but the Intel and the AMD both use different instruction sets for processing data.

 

[Peter]

Not really. The base instruction set is the same x86; only the multimedia extensions differ.

 

[Mingon]

You are forgetting about the upgrade on a pci card from I think powerleap - technically a intel chip working on a amd mobo - although not using the processor bus.

 

[Shalmanese]

You can buy a Mac PCI board for x86 with 4 sockets for G4's and up to 2Gb of RAM. You can also get x86 boards for Suns