If it could have been...imaginary old school dream systems

Discussion relating to Socket 7 hardware.
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If it could have been...imaginary old school dream systems

Post by Guest »

I wish there could have been a dual K6-III+ 600Mhz system using DDR PC2100.

THAT would have been DA BOMB!

What do you guys wish "could have been"? (within some reason, now).
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Stedman5040
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Post by Stedman5040 »

I would be quite happy with a high performing chipset from VIA or ALI that came with PC133 support with a 4x divider. Better AGP support for SS7 and 1MHz increments for FSB overclocking would have been good.

Stedman.
Jim
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Post by Jim »

That 1 Mhz increments is maybe asking a bit much. Me, I'd like to have seen DFI stick something in between 103 and 112. Say 105, and 108 would have been nice.
Superpuppy 3
K6-3+ 450 ACZ (6x100)
DFI K6BV3+/66 Rev B2 (2 Meg) w/ 2x28mm Chipset Fans
2x256 Meg PC 133 Hynix SDRAM
1x 20G Maxtor (7200)
2x 80G Maxtor (7200) Ducted w/ 2x486 Fans Mount
52/24/52/16 LG CDR/RW/DVD
8/4/3/12/24/16/32 LG Super Multi
ATI 9000 aiw Radeon AGP
SB Audigy 1 MP3 Sound
CMD 649 IDE Controller
NEC USB 2 Card
DasMan2

Post by DasMan2 »

I would like that the newer developments of solid-state hard drives that comeout to be easily compatible with older chipsets for the older motherboards.

I would also like a way to re-work onboard cache chips to higher performances and sizings or a direct attachment device onto the socket 7 cpu socket that includes a superlarge fast cache module of greater than 8 meg size ..maybe 64 meg size down the development stream.

Also a special add-on socket 7 device to allow 4 cpu's in a block format including the supercache module intergated.

BIOS chip included in these add-ons devices.
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KGB
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Post by KGB »

I do hate to be the bearer of bad new, but the physical limitations of the K6 archtecture is what really hinders any possibility of what you've imagined. Don't take me as a pessimist, hardly. If I could somehow further use the K6 architecture today more often, I would. However, software in some cases pushes hardware to its superficial limit. Bloated, wasteful, clock cycle eating, superfluous, new software. If there had been any sense in the programming community, we could be running applications on a Pentium 233 as fast as its performed on a P4 Northwood.

Technically though, at some point, we would have hardware limitations. The P3 line was intel's finest, most profitable, and best selling. Ever wonder why they introduced chipsets featuring RDRAM and DDR RAM for the platform on top of the already popular SDRAM? Well you can surmise, because the platform was that popular and widely spread. Architrectural hinderances, on top of software created on the cheap (ie: poorly, laxly) brought the chip to its knees. Memory bandwidth available, compared to feasability of the P3 core to use it, further distanced, and eventually it was "upgraded" to utilize all that jazz.

As for me, I like my K6-2, one day I hope to purchase a K6-III+ @600
ATZ core, and plug it in along with this setup:

3 x 256MB SDRAM PC133 Cas2
ATi Radeon x850Pro (Volt modded)
Adaptec 19160 SCSI Adapter
Adaptec 4 port Serial ATA 3.0Gbs Adapter
Adaptec FireDuo: Firewire 800, USB 2.0/Wireless USB Adapter
Creative X-Fi Sound Card
Linksys WiFi-n adapter
Linksys Bluetooth 1.2 USB2.0
Infra-Red Device Ready
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
2 x Seagate Cheetah 74GB 15K RPM HDD's
2 x Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200.12
Toshiba 16x BD-RW
Toshiba 16x DVD-+RW DL
2 x Dell 2400FP
Klipsch 7.1 channel THX Certifed Surround Sound Speaker
Logitech QuickCam Express USB
iOmega 250MB Zip IDE
12 in 1 Flash Drive USB 2.0
and the Venerable 1.44MB Floppy

This setup is plausable sometime in the future, my only gripe would be that Win2Ksp4 would one day cease to be supported by Microsoft.
-K6-2 550 Gigagyte GA-5AX (5.2) 1x512MB GeForce 2 Ti500 64MB
-Pentium III 933 Asus P3C-L 2x128MB GeForce 4 Ti4200 128MB DDR
-Pentium III 750 Asus P3B-F ATi Rage128 GL 32MB
-Celeron 1.2 Asus TUSI-M 2x128MB
-Pentium IV 1.5 DELL 2350 1x128MB
-Athlon 900 Asus K7M 1x256MB 2x128MB GeForce 3 64MB
-AthlonXP-M 2400+ Asus K7V880 2x512MB HIS Radeon HD3850 512MB DDR
Jim
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Location: Toronto

Post by Jim »

Would recommend you go with either an ACZ or an ANZ. Though apparently all K63+s and K6-2+s came from the same wafer; and were manufactured to the same specs, the ATZ is from that part of the wafer that AMD judged likely to be the lowest performers.
Superpuppy 3
K6-3+ 450 ACZ (6x100)
DFI K6BV3+/66 Rev B2 (2 Meg) w/ 2x28mm Chipset Fans
2x256 Meg PC 133 Hynix SDRAM
1x 20G Maxtor (7200)
2x 80G Maxtor (7200) Ducted w/ 2x486 Fans Mount
52/24/52/16 LG CDR/RW/DVD
8/4/3/12/24/16/32 LG Super Multi
ATI 9000 aiw Radeon AGP
SB Audigy 1 MP3 Sound
CMD 649 IDE Controller
NEC USB 2 Card
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Uranium235
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Posts: 183
Joined: Mon Sep 12, 2005 9:59 pm

Post by Uranium235 »

Here's a few , maybe realistic, socket 7 upgrades I would like to have seen:
1) An increase in size of the K6-3's L2 cache to 512K from 256K. Maybe another die shrink would be necessary. You could call it a K6-4.
2)A working 133FSB
3)Multipliers 6.5X to 10X with the possibility to clock up to 1Ghz.
4)4X AGP boards.
5)ATA100 IDE controllers
6)BIOS with all possible chipset settings. Tweaker heaven.
:D
Guest

Post by Guest »

KGB,

No, I don't think there are any REAL physical limitations to the K6 architecture. ASUS made one dual "classic" pentium P54 board using the HX chipset, see below.

http://www.aberdeeninc.com/abcatg/MB5753.htm

Also, the K6-III+ works up to 600Mhz on an VERY old ASUS P/I P55T2P4 board (was tested by Tomshardware.com). http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?A ... 000000&p=3

I don't think it would be a stretch to conclude, that, if the companies wanted, support for a dual K6 system could have been very plausible, using the HX chipset, some BIOS updates, and voltage support.

As far as the K6 core itself, I thought I'd read that SMP was simply disabled on the chip.
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tazwegion
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Post by tazwegion »

Hmmmm... a dual K6x motherboard would've been nice, with DDR support even nicer! :D

Alas, it wasn't to be... so we make do with what we have, or move on (and upgrade) :(
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stevenaaus
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S7 the most fun, but slack at games

Post by stevenaaus »

My wish is that AMD and Intel never forked their motherboard bases, or
multiplier locked their cpus' - which was a fairly cynical move. The fun
about S7 is taking your friends still needed P166 and supercharging it to
around 500hz with a couple of jumper changes and a new CPU and perhaps memory.
My boss runs a $5000 printer on an FX pentium board. Next week I'm donating a
tx board and a 500mhz K6-2 (at 400Mhz) to give it an overhaul.

Another wish is that the K6-s had a decent FPU and MMX unit. I love playing the old
3D games like Quake I and III, American McGee's Alice and Star Trek Elite Force,
and had to upgrade to an athlon (k7-759) but I would have stuck with my K6-III
and probably bought an overclocked K6 plus if I could have.
p54-166/p55-200 - ga586
k6/2-380@412 - txp4
k75-750 slot a - pcchips 800LMR (rock solid)
compaq C2.4Ghz - U8668grand (cheap)
Sempron 3400+ (754) - K8VM800M, FX5600, Fedora 7
E5200 - Asrock 4CoreDual-Sata2
Core 2 Quad 9400 - Asus P5G41-M
Guest

Post by Guest »

Yeah that was the great thing about S7, it had such a long and glorious life. If you think about it, it really had long life - from 75 up to about 600Mhz. That's like a 500% spread on that platform. The Pentium III had only about, what? 300% increase? The slot A athlon's were even worse.
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jsc1973
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Post by jsc1973 »

SMP was (and still is) possible on K6-x CPU's. AMD included the OpenPic protocol for SMP (developed by Motorola) on those CPU's, but no one ever made a Socket 7 chipset that supported this. All x86 chipsets have used the rival SMP protocol, APIC, which was developed by Intel.

DDR support would have been of no use. The architecture of the K6 CPU's doesn't even fully saturate the bandwidth available with ordinary PC100 SDRAM. This is why K6-2 chips improve so dramatically with any increase in FSB. K6-III and "plus" chips, with their on-die L2 cache, aren't so susceptible to this, but even they don't use anywhere near the full memory bandwidth of SDRAM.

Similarly, a mutiplier above 6x isn't possible, because that's a limitation of the CPU. AMD would have had to make a fundamental redesign of the chip, which wasn't cost-effective for them.

The ideal, realistic motherboard for a K6-x chip would include a working 133 MHz FSB, with the proper PCI and AGP dividers and a 2 MB cache on the motherboard, plus support for OpenPic SMP. We could then have run dual K6-III+ chips at 4.5*133, which would have blown the doors off even a 1 GHz Pentium III. If AMD had been able to deliver the K6-III a year earlier, and hadn't just come out with it on the heels of the Athlon, we might well have seen this. After all, the late-arriving Aladdin7 chipset did have 133 MHz and a /4 divider.
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