asian1 wrote:
Hi
This new motherboard accept either Intel Pentium 4 or AMD 64 CPU.
I read that Southbridge of PowerPC 970 is compatible with AMD 64.
Is it possible to use ECS PF88 with PowerPC 970?
Hmm, there's an idea that makes that thing sound less ridiculous. Though it still is, since to support Intel they're shipping a big, hot, expensive Intel-supporting northbridge on the board.
I would wager it 'could be done,' but probably not terribly cost-effectively, especially since the 970 card would need to carry both the big hot 970 and the IBM/Apple northbridge. AMD is 'easy' because all that junk really is on the one chip, and they 'only' have to ship a slocket and worry about the memory bus and HT lines.
If they standardized the slot, some third party might be able to find the task worthwhile. (But the pessimist in me says the CPU card would still end up costing what PowerPC CPU cards cost today, which is still rather high.)
Edit: Nevermind, they're putting practically *everything* on the card, including a separate memory bus... which is naturally slightly ridiculous, but pushes the parts cost of actually doing anything back onto the card. I don't know how the SiS chips are coming these days, do they take HT in from the CPU and then immediately convert it to MuTIOL or whatever SiS's proprietary bus is? That might explain something (using either HT or PCI-E apparently being too sane for them), and further "lock out" the 970 from their concept -- until/unless SiS makes a bridge for it.
[Well, to confirm, that *is* how SiS is doing it -- HT into the 'northbridge,' which sounds like it exists partially just to bridge to MuTIOL to hand to the south... So that's why they say it doesn't use PCI-E, it uses MuTIOL and probably whatever else the 'northbridge' has coming off it -- which does seem to include PCI-E, so maybe that's a white lie, but it doesn't matter, because MuTIOL is still what lets them use the southbridge. For all I know, they've got some trick to run MuTIOL through the other NB so the PCI-E traces don't have to get "tee'd" and have their electrical characteristics compromised.]
That's kind of heroically stupid of them, actually, considering what straight HT could do, but I guess it costs out better somehow. Or is "MuTIOL 1G" now really just HT rebranded?
