From: Niall O Broin (niall at domain linux.ie)
Date: Wed 20 Jun 2001 - 17:08:11 IST
On Wed, Jun 20, 2001 at 11:37:46AM +0100, Paul Jakma wrote:
> > Other minor detail is that no AMD processor currently available in this
> > country can be used in a SMP configuration.
>
> it's not the cpu, it's the chipset. Athlon would work fine if someone
> built a chipset that supported SMP (see below). Indeed, K6 would
> "support" SMP too.
I always understood that CPUs had to be specially designed to handle MP. At
the very least isn't cache coherency an issue (I suppose the chipset could
invalidate cache pages somehow, but I've always heard about MP capable
chips, so I presumed that chips had to be specially designed. How, for
instance, do they handle the fact that they can't access memory ad lib ?)
Regards,
Niall "Not much of a CPU designer" O Broin
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