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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: Paul Engel who wrote (53615)3/29/1999 11:20:00 PM
From: Craig Freeman  Read Replies (2) of 1572711
 
Paul, thanks for the detailed response. But my gut says that things would be viewed differently if someone actually accomplished the feat and put four K6s on one mobo:

1. "Low demand". True because you can't buy one anywhere. Now.

1A. "Not supported by Win95/98." True but MSFT has started pushing NT workstation and their forthcoming Windows 2000. By the time someone worked the hardware bugs out, Windows 2000 will be the "in" thing to own.

1B. "Performs poorly," Poorly compared to what? Four K6/2-350s could run at 50% efficiency and still totally tromp a PIII/550 for a fraction of the cost.

2. "Non-standard Interrupt". Was Slot 1 or Socket 370 a standard before they sold the first one? A little work with MSFT and all manner of things become possible.

3. "No bus snooping". You got me there. Perhaps there's an elegant solution. In a pinch, AMD could tweak the K6 to add this feature.

I picture a $150 mobo with four CPU sockets, 2MB of shared 100MHz L2 and a double-wide (but otherwise conventional) memory bus. VIA provides the custom memory/cache manager that is optimized for CPU pairs/quads.

Result: GHz throughput for a song. An ideal box for networks, mail servers, WTS, Citrix, Linux, etc. And a box that could be sold with margins that don't all land in Intel's bank account under the name "Xeon revenues".

IMHO, if somebody eventually does this, it could change the way PCs are made and sold.

Craig
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