Re: athlon xp vs. athlon mp (ot...kinda)

["Benjamin R. Mohilef" <benm dsl-only net>]

> so now down to the question.  whats the difference between a dual
> athlon xp system and a dual athlon mp system besides a >huge< price
> difference?  the dual mp motherboards are twice as expensive...as are
> the athlon mp processors.

The mp has been configured by AMD to run in a multiprocessing 
enviornment. That said, the newsgroups are full of both success 
and failure stories of people trying to use XP's in multiprocessor 
systems. There exists a trace on the XP's that only the brave cut 
which enable the multiprocessor features. If you search the 
newsgroups you will get a more detailed description of that 
hardware hack, but from a reliability and cost-effectiveness position 
I would never try it myself (we used to the call stuff like that  the 
"maximum smoke"  method of engineering).

> also, how supported is this kinda stuff in the linux kernel in redhat

The Asus a7m266-d board runs two MP processors and does an 
excellent job under both updated RH 8.0 and the current RH 
RawHide release . I couldn't be happier with the systems. 
Particularly glad that they recognize pci based hardware (for which 
I am writing a driver) without coaxing. The Asus board is used quite 
widely with the AMD mp processors because of the ease with which 
Linux and even Win 2000 work with it.