Hey all

well, was just curious, was reading the review of the new tyan board (tiger i7500 and such and was curious if any regular P4 mobo's exist or are in the making any time soon?

Nope, afraid not.
They will never exist as the current P4 CPU's are not SMP aware - they simply cannot be used in dual set-up's.
If this will change with the release of Prescot or future "desktop Pentiums" we'll just have to wait and see.

Any reason why they did not make the SMP compatible or what have you? i figured since PIII had it that they would do it with P4's for those of us who don't want to pay for dual Xeons.

Well that is the very reason why Intel didn't do it.
Dual P4 setup's would eat directly into their own dual Xeon market.
Lets be honest, a couple of Northwood B's are not going to be as fast as some of the Xeon setup's but would probably be cheaper and a lot of people would take that option.

The other was a turn around by Intel on what the home/general user actually needs.
The P3's were SMP aware aalthough the average users wasn't interested.
There is so very little software out there that can actually make use of a dual-CPU setup.
So Intel's focus changed to getting the fastest possible processors out there and pushing that to their high-end users rather than dual.
Most average users thought that two CPU's gave double the performance etc.

Intel also feel that if you have the real need for dual CPU's then you probably wont mind spending the extra on the Xeon.

the processors arent that expensive but x2

then the supporting equipment usually is quite a bit more

Hyperhtreading has now made it seem like 2 CPU's....lets see how it fares eh....

hehe get dual Xeon 3.0's if and when they are out - it will see 4 cpus hehe, would be kew.

Even with Hyperthreading, there's still only one physical processor, and the system will be limited as such. It's my opinion that hyperthreading will really only make a difference in benchmarking... If a single program is using +/-90% of the cpu threads, it makes no difference which 'virtual' processor the threads are being processed by.

Actually, from what I understand (which isn't much, this could be completely wrong, my lack of interest in the P4 extends to dual configurations as well and as such, I never bothered researching this further), only the Willamette P4s (which are garbage anyway so it really doesn't matter) aren't SMP capable. The Northwoods have the capability but no motherboards exist. If a dual (non-Xeon) P4 board were to exist it'd have to be based on the i850 (not sure whether this includes the new 'E' revision or not) chipset since the processor bus termination on the i845 is only set up for one CPU.

I honestly feel that if this was possible we would have a motherboard that allows you to do it by now.
It seems unlikely that an Intel chipset would support such a setup as said above, they would be cutting their own throat by making a rival product to their premium line (dual Xeon).
SIS, VIA, ServerWorks would be the sensible thought, but the fact that Northwood has been around for ages and no chipset nor talk of a dual P4 setup has been bantered around would certainly lead me to believe it is disabled at the chip level - like HT on all P4's below 3Ghz.

Via would have done it by now if anyone.

They already hacked the P4 for thier chipset, so they would have made one if it were possible.

the admiral sounds like a amd man

heh, I only mentioned the Willamette P4 as being garbage, I never mentioned the Northwood

ahhh
without looking around.. was that the pre socket 478 chip
socket 430 or sunthin

That was Socket 423 and was actually a lot larger than the newer Socket 478.
Willamette CPU's were available in both socet configurations.
I also disagree with them being described as garbage.
I owned a 1.8Ghz Willamette (soon to be passed on to my girlfriend) and I felt it performed great.
It's not as if I went into the purchase of that blindly, AMD was an option for me at the time and cheaper to boot - I just prefer (in my opinion) the Intel stability.

I use a 1.5Ghz Willamette equipped with 256Mb PC800 RDRAM at the TAFE college I attend and it really doesn't feel like a 1500Mhz proc. Granted it's running 98 (not my choice, if it were up to me I'd have XP on it) which is a handicap in itself (and probably why it doesn't feel as snappy as my lowly 500Mhz PII running XP) but it is noticably slower than a 900Mz Duron with, of all things, a Via KT133 chipset and 128Mb PC133 SDRAM (this one runs 98 as well). Given what this machine would have cost (it also has a GenuineIntel motherboard too which would have further jacked the price up) its performance really is quite crappy.

AMD is turing down the APPLE road.

I hope they don't get all wierd on us

Of course when you make a chip that needs less clock cycles to get stuff done and release it into a market where the vast majority of people still think clock speed is everything when it comes to CPUs you have little choice but to go down the "Apple road"...

they arent marketing anything
look at the marketing campaign they have against intel's
the average american buys whatever they see on tv.

the rest of us with a brain will buy intel 8)

Sorry, I just couldn't help it...

The proc issues aren't so much Apple's fault, as Motorolla's. They haven't had a strong desire to push the design envelope, so they don't. Their design has a *very* shallow pipeline, while AMD's is longer and Intel's in longer still. However, Apple's systems started having problems in the performance world back when the P3 450s started showing up and some application vendors (*cough* adobe *cough*) actually put a bit of time and money into designing their apps to run on x86 systems, and not just doing a fairly shoddy "port" of their app. So, I would have to say that "going the Apple way" would have to be moronic at best. AMD just sticks with a shallow pipeline and has a fairly minor investment in chipsets (very bad idea) whereas Intel goes with a longer pipeline, more processing tricks (heavier branch prediction and "Hyper-Threading"), and puts a good deal of cash into chipsets that showcase their CPUs.

(no flame intended)

well guys thnx for the good read!

Finally, someone who sees the reality of it ;-).

I did not even see that part - makes complete sense

perhaps just another marketing scam to get Intel way on top.