Pentium III SMP

[Alizarin]

Ok, so I have this server motherboard that supports dual processor Pentium III. I saw on NewEgg that they have PIII 1.2ghz processors (retail) for a price I can handle, but checking out the pictures of the box it says "Uniprocessor systems only", whereas the 1.26ghz (retail) PIII, although with more cache and (much) higher cost, is "dual processor capable".

So here's my question: Why is this? Is there a technical reason that they say uniprocessor only or is it a matter of Intel saying "We want you to pay more for SMP"?

 

[redbeard1]

There is a difference. Intel puts instructions on the chip as to whether or not they will work in SMP. I believe in the new tulatin's, the chip needs to have 512 cache to work in a dual configuration.

 

[Alizarin]

Ahh, I guess that would explain it. The one that is "Dual processor compatible" is 512k cache compared to the other which is 256k.

Thanks much

 

[Alizarin]

Ok so here's another question if anybody can answer it. The motherboard in question is a Tyan model S2567 (Thunder HEsl), Socket 370 and all that. Now to the question. This page at Tyan says that the mobo supports PIII FC Coppermine core processors. I don't know what the FC means but I think it's somewhat of a moot point because the processors on NewEgg are the Tualatin core. There is a BIOS update for the motherboard, but I didn't see anything mentioned about adding support for Tualatin processors. The last BIOS update is dated 9/28/01, and as I can't remember when that core was released they may not even be thinking of releasing support for it.

Any info anybody can provide would be awesome, thanks in advance