Re: Building Big Ass Linux Machine, what are the limits?

Erik Corry (erik@arbat.com)
Tue, 29 Sep 1998 01:17:32 +0200


In article <98Sep28.202959gmt.66310@gateway.ukaea.org.uk> you wrote:
> Chris Zwilling wrote:
>>
>> I heard that the Xeon can not scale beyond four processors.
>> (http://www.intel.com/archive/speeches/sp062998.htm).

Fujitsu/Amdahl has announced a four-way
server that will be upgradable to 8-way:
http://www.amdahl.com/doc/products/redletters/mm002754.htm
According to c't it is based on "Synfinity Interconnects"
and a NUMA architecture.

> Neil
> (PS: never mind 36-bit, just being able to use 2-4GB of phys. mem. beats
> a lot of PPro boards and certainly most PII boards so that's one (for me
> anyway) good reason to buy Xeon... In fact, I just wish they had made

Here's the addressable memory according to chipset table:
http://developer.intel.com/design/pcisets/linecard.htm

440EX 256Mbyte the 'Celeron chipset'
440FX 1Gbyte the old PPro chipset, no SDRAM/AGP
440LX 1Gbyte EDO the 66MHz chipset with SDRAM and AGP
512Mbyte SDRAM
440BX 1Gbyte the 'current chipset' with 100MHz
440GX 2Gbyte server chipset
440NX 8Gbyte server chipset

So you need an NX chipset in order to run into serious
problems with Linux. You also need a newish P-II that can
cache over 512MB. The NX chipset doesn't support SDRAM,
AGP, or Power management.

-- 
Erik Corry erik@arbat.com           Ceterum censeo, Microsoftem esse delendam!

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