Dual CPU machines possible?

[ShintaiDK]

True, of course, but as I recall, it was quite a bit easier to go dual socket than it is now. You didn't need nearly as much specialized, expensive hardware.

It was actually harder in the past as I recall it. Simply because you never knew if everything would work right. Needed same SPEC CPUs etc.

Maybe I am just getting old, but I prefer it the way it is today.

 

[pyjujiop]

- Arh, not quite true, I had a friend back in the uni days that did the dual celeron trick .. you had to *drill* actual holes through the damned chips to make em work in dual mode. But it worked!! dual celeron 300@450MHz .. screaming beast (and faster at many things than equal regular P2's due to the full speed on die cache.)

He shouldn't have needed to do anything on a Celeron 300A. All you needed was an ABIT BP6 and a couple of 300A's and you were set. What happened later on was that Intel disabled the SMP feature on the Celerons that were based on Pentium III architecture (566 MHz and up). There were workarounds for a while, but eventually, Intel completely broke SMP on Celerons.

 

[BenchPress]

Eight cores might be overkill for games, but I'm sure that photo & video editing, rendering, etc. would benefit.

Just wait for Haswell. It has twice the vector processing throughput per core. So for vectorizable tasks like the ones you summed up, four Haswell cores will be as powerful as eight legacy cores. While also costing less and producing less heat.

 

[NTMBK]

Just wait for Haswell. It has twice the vector processing throughput per core. So for vectorizable tasks like the ones you summed up, four Haswell cores will be as powerful as eight legacy cores. While also costing less and producing less heat.

If you buy all new versions of your several-hundred-pound applications which have been rewritten/recompiled for AVX2, sure...

 

[biostud]

Since you can already get six core in one socket for consumer boards, there's little reason to do dual socket boards for consumers.