[geeks] OS X on x86

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Tue, 18 Oct 2005 @ 01:48 -0500, Phil Brutsche said:

> Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> > Why not?
> > 
> > PCIe on the motherboard doesn't determine what CPU the board can run.
> 
> Yes, it does.
> 
> With extremely rare exceptions (ie there is only 1 board on the market
> from a manufacturer with major quality problems) P4 motherboards that
> support PCIe have a 775-pin LGA (large gate array) CPU socket; 2.4GHz
> P4s were never released in a LGA 775 package.
> 
> If the system in question had PCIe (and hence LGA 775) the slowest P4
> you could put in it is 2.66GHz.

BTW, I meant PCI as the chip interconnect, not just the expansion bus.

On the PCIe *expansion bus* issue, I didn't realize no one was making a
478 board with PCIe except ASRock, and it does seem to suck. It's a dual
CPU board, the P4Dual-915L. They now have an LGA775 version.

I don't see any technical reasons this can't be done though. CPUs change
so fast, manufacturers always have to work hard go glue the system
chipsets to the CPUs.

Also, Intel has an interest in seeing that no backward compatibility to
something like socket 478 happens.

I'm willing to bet though that someone will do it, and will do it well.
There are *tons* of those CPUs out there.

As far as PCIe as the system bus goes, its just a matter of will anyone
want to build the glue for a non-LGA system. Eventually I know they
will, because Intel will come up with yet another socket and PCIe will
need to be there.




-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["The object of war is not to die for your
country but to make the other bastard die for his." -- General George S.
Patton]