Rodrigo Ventura <yoda@isr.ist.utl.pt> wrote:
>
> BTW, I have a question: Can the availability of dual-CPU boards for intel
> and amd processors, rather then tri- or quadra-CPU boards, be explained with
> the fact that the performance degrades significantly for three or more CPUs?
> Or is there a technological and/or comercial reason behind?
Commercial reasons. Cost per motherboard/chipset goes way up as the number of
CPUs supported goes up. For each CPU that a chipset supports, it has to add a
lot of pins/lands, and chipsets are already typically land-limited.
Motherboard trace complexity (and therefore number of layers) goes up. Add to
that that the potential market goes down as CPUs goes up.
You can buy 4-, 8-, and 16-way motherboards for Intel CPUs (don't know about
more). But the 16-way ones will cost as much as a house.
Charles
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Charles Cazabon <linux@discworld.dyndns.org> GPL'ed software available at: http://www.qcc.sk.ca/~charlesc/software/ Any opinions expressed are just that -- my opinions. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Jun 23 2001 - 21:00:28 EST