[geeks] Re: [rescue] Overdrive Chips

[Gregory Leblanc]

I mean to reply to the beginning of this thread, but I seem to have
misplaced it.

On Sat, 2001-09-15 at 17:30, Zach Malone wrote:
> > Check out pcsurplusonline.com for the 333 version of the PPro, called
> > Overdrive. They are new, in box, and have a fan included. Just $49.99. I
> > purchased 2, installed them in my Pr440 motherboard (dual PPro) and it
> just
> > sings! The Overdrive is a PII with a full speed cache on a Socket 8 (PPro)
> > chip.
> 
> Will the Overdrive chips work in 4 and 6 way setups?  Or is it like the P2
> in that only 2 way SMP is supported?

There was never an Intel chipset that supported more than 4 processor
PPro configurations (well, not one that you could buy and build a
commertial motherboard with, anyway).  There were actually boxes that
used quite a few more than 8 PPro CPUs, for "strange" systems.  I
believe that Sequent had boxes that would take at least 24 PPro chips.
As for the overdrives, Intel only "supports" them in dual processor
configs.  I think Mike has had luck with more than that.

As for why the PPro is so well liked, it's -not- because it's the first
reasonable processor that Intel produced (clearly the 80386 holds
that).  The PPro does 32-bit math a lot better than any previous intel
chip, at the expense of it's 16-bit operations.  When they were new, not
all that many things were using 32-bit mode, but now that advantage
really pays off.  Later,
	Greg