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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: Nitro on August 18, 2003, 04:55:23 PM
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Anyone ever heard of a main board that has dual cpu
one X86 and one PPC. Would it even be possible.
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I doubt anyone has ever done it. They have different support chipsets, for starters.
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With the 970 and Opteron wouldn't it be possible to make such a board? Both use Hypertransport... At least the 970 should be able to use Opteron's Northbridges...
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@Nitro
As yourself this: why would anyone have built one, and who would have bought it?
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why would anyone have built one,
Cross compilation, virus diagnostic in a safe environment, really quick debugging?
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The practical difficulties of such a board are mind boggling. It would be much easier just to have seperate x86 and PPC machines.
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@KennyR
Actually it is possible to do it, providing you kept the logic seperate (two different RAM banks) and communicated via the PCI bus (which is fine for such things)
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Anyone ever heard of a main board that has dual cpu
one X86 and one PPC. Would it even be possible.
Possible: sure.
Done: Probably not.
You can get PPC based PCI cards though but you'll probably pay $$$ for them.
With the 970 and Opteron wouldn't it be possible to make such a board? Both use Hypertransport...
Only Opteron has HT at the moment - but IBM have just joined the HT forum :-)
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"Only Opteron has HT at the moment - but IBM have just joined the HT forum :-)"
oh, I thought that the 970 used Hypertransport... sorry
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as ArticiaS is able to use PPC, X86 or MIPS ... then why shouldn't it be possible to make an PPC+X86 dual board?
I don't think that it would be the best combination, but might be possible ;-)
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why would anyone have built one, and who would have bought it?
Save desk space? With an integrated Mouse/Keyboard/Monitor switcher, it could be a fun little toy. :-)
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Crumb wrote:
"Only Opteron has HT at the moment - but IBM have just joined the HT forum :-)"
oh, I thought that the 970 used Hypertransport... sorry
The G5 uses the proprietary ApplePI/Elastic Bus/whatever the heck it is between the CPU and the offboard memory/system controller.
The system controller (practically, the 'chipset') then hosts a HT link or few that allow the use of commodity PCI-X bridges and integrated-peripheral chips ("southbridges," though that term seems to be wearing thin). I don't know if Apple is actually using commodity parts for these now, but this reserves them the option, and/or keeps any custom work they do in that domain 'standard' enough that it could be licensed for others' designs (or just coexist with later iterations of their product line - who knows what the useful life of the 970's bus will actually be, and/or if it'll get replaced by HT at some point?)...
So anyhow, the 970 itself doesn't use it, but the Macs do, and it's hard (not impossible, but hard- you'd have to cram all your PCI-X and whatnot the same chip, and hope you can find something better than the 686B to use for the onboard peripherals people expect) to imagine a system hub without it, for desktop purposes at least. Maybe if those sorts of peripheral chips do show up, or someone licenses V-Link or something weird, instead...
http://www.apple.com/powermac/architecture.html (http://www.apple.com/powermac/architecture.html)
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The closest thing I can think of are the x86 and PPC PCI cards that you can get. you could plug them into the one machine.
Or even better just get an x86 machine and plug a PPC PCI card into it, or vice-versa.
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@iamaboringperson
Yeah I've heard of the PCI cards. I just thought mayble I could try build a less expensive PPC machine like that. I think it would be kinda cool if I could boot Morph and Win from the same tower.
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Hello
There are several Multi CPU machine:
1. PC motherboards with i860 RISC co-processor
for SCSI or Network.
2. Old Olivetti PC with both X86 and Motorola
88K CPU.
3. Multi CPU system from ZIATECH (now Intel).
4. Archistrat PANDA machine with compass bus.
5. The secret Motorola PowerPC 615 (just rumor?)
6. IBM PS/2 950 prototype board for OS/2 PowerPC
(not on the market).
8 years ago, TAOS (the pre-cursor of AmigaDE)
run on top of Quad PowerPC 601 CPU card inside
a DELL Pentium / 80 MHz PC.
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Commodore 128 had a Z80 too, you didn´t forget that did you?
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The PowerPC 615 was an IBM project, and hardly a secret. Nor was it what most people figure.
IBM was designing a PowerPC that would have a PC's FSB, so as to use cheaper northbridges. To allow the PC bios to work, a small x86-compatable core was also included, but you'd have gotten maybe 486DX2 performance out of it.
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asian1 wrote:
Hello
There are several Multi CPU machine:
1. PC motherboards with i860 RISC co-processor
for SCSI or Network.
If we're counting these, we may as well count everything with a GPU or embedded controller. The I2O initiative made sense from a technical standpoint, but apparently got mired in bureaucracy, and became a dumping ground for the i860 chips when Intel failed to get them into the workstation market. (Something about focusing the initial compiler efforts on ADA!?)
http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?i860 (http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?i860)
Not a bad little chip, for 1989.
Edit: Okay, I might be more than a little off here... http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i860 (http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i860) -- i860 and i960 aren't really related; http://www.chipcenter.com/eexpert/dgilbert/dgilbert027.html (http://www.chipcenter.com/eexpert/dgilbert/dgilbert027.html) -- the i960 is the one more associated with I2O? ...Or did both end up dumped at that market, anyway? Here's a recentish Intel card on eBay using the i960, (http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3040976879&category=1484) can't remember enough part numbers to find more 'vintage' boards.