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Intel

New PIII: SMP In, Serial Number Out 56

Posted by timothy from the ah-sweet-validation dept.
florin writes: "This article from GamePC talks about the new cB0 stepping of the Intel Pentium III processor. The FC-PGA format has finally been validated for use in multiprocessor systems. After much confusion about this issue, it is good to see 'Now Dual Processor Capable' clearly marked on the retail box. Another item of interest is that Intel has gone ahead and stripped the controversial processor serial number feature from this new PIII, like they announced they would do on their upcoming Willamette CPU. "
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New PIII: SMP In, Serial Number Out More

New PIII: SMP In, Serial Number Out

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  • Intel did not drop the random number generator. It is not a feature of the CPU, but of the motherboard. I believe the i810 chipset contains the chip.
  • Haven't you heard? Slots are out again, sockets are in. :)

    I have no idea why Intel went to Slot 1 and 2 in the first place. The L2 cache moved from on-die to off-die, then moved back on-die. What the hell? Is Intel just trying to make life difficult?

    With the K6-III, AMD was able to implement on-die cache using the Socket 7 format. In fact, the K6-III used up to two megabytes of L3 cache, as well! It's too bad that the K6-III was such a spectacular failure. It could have been a very nice CPU.

    Trivia: there's a socket-based Pentium II processor. Know what it is?

  • I don't quite understand why, as it is obvious that Intel should be cutting their chip prices now. With AMD ramping up its production of chips costing only about 50-75% as compared to Intel processors, Intel is going to lose.

    Obviously you haven't paid attention to the market in the last six months and/or you are clueless about economics. THE DEMAND FOR INTEL PRODUCTS AT THEIR CURRENT PRICES FAR EXCEEDS SUPPLY OF THE PRODUCTS. This is a fact; the supply problems Intel is facing are well-documented. If anything, Intel could RAISE prices and still sell as many chips, and be even more profitable.

    You also have to understand that the low-end is _nothing_ compared to the business segment of the industry. AMD currently has about 13% of the total CPU market, and Intel has 84%. However, in the home PC segment it is about 50%/50%. This shows how tiny a segment the home PC market is, and shows that at least 84% of Intel's business is in the business segment. The bread and butter of Intel's processor business is servers. AMD has no product in that segment yet, and, even if they did, they would have a hard time marketing it, and finding an OEM for it. Currently, Athlon has penetrated the home PC market, but nowhere else significantly.

    The reason CPU makers want to play in the home PC business is not for profits, but for name recognition. It keeps the brand name visible to consumers, not just businesses.

    If anything, AMD will become less profitable from marketing the Duron, because the ASP of its parts will dramatically drop. No longer are wafer starts going to profitable Athlons, but a $50 part. By producing Duron's, they are losing a ton of opportunity cost for producing Athlon's.

  • p.s. AMD is never going to be anything more than a thorn in Intel's side. Intel is too big, too well-established, and too rich to suffer more than minor setbacks.

    Yes! Thank you for saying it. Moderate that man up! AMD, AMD, AMD, that's all I ever hear! They are going nowhere, and big established all-powerful Intel is going to give them a spanking, just like the spanking that Microsoft is getting from big established all-powerful IBM. It may not be apparent now, but it's happening. IBM just needs to finish spanking Compaq. Once Microchannel is established, watch out ...

  • I don't recall if it was the thunderbird or mustang Athlons, but I do remember that they were going to have 16 way associative cache. Besides the AMD 760MP boards, I think there were also plans by Micron to create multi-processor samurai chipsets with DDR DRAM support.
  • AMD already have around 17% market share, and onece Fab30 in Dresden is fully ramped it will be running 5000+ WSPW, which at current die sizes will give them enough capacity to take 30%+ market share. AMD is actually gaining market share at the HIGH end, since their process technology is currently well ahead of Intels (all .18 micron, with copper interconnect in Dresden, moving to .13 micron by next year). Intel are still struggling to upgrade their fabs from .25 micron to .18, and are still using aluminum interconnect - it'll be a year before they move to copper.

    Go to any computer store and all the fastest computers (900MHz+) are going to be AMD.

    On top of the process advantages, the Athlon/Thunderbird is a modern core design, and has plenty of head room for clock speed upgrades. Intel's new Willamette core may conceivably start sample in a few months time, but won't be start to be available in any sort of volume to replace the PIII until Q1 2001. Intel expect it will take 3-8 quarters (huge range!) for Willamette to fully replace PIII. In the meantime, AMD Mustang will be out in Q4, and Sledgehammer in late 2001.

    BTW, AMD's 760-MP (aka 770) dual way SMP chipset is due out in Q3 to coincide with DDR availability. Micron (whose chipset technology is licenced to Via) are coming out with high end SMP chipset support for Thunderbird.
  • I hear the new cb0 doesn't really work in SMP that well. Some do Some don't. Is this true? They need to iron out the problems with cb0 stepping so that smp works all around first.

  • 750: outperforms BX (intel's watermark, since 820/840 only best it *barely* with rambust)

    A chipset can't outperform another chipset. You're making nonsense claims. I don't really see any reason to reply to your other points.
  • A web site cannot get to anything on your machine without a software hook. Should be as easy to disable this as it is to disable the MAC adddress.


    ...................

    ... paka chubaka

  • Provided your motherboard can provide the right voltage for the Coppermine and your BIOS supports it, the Abit Slotket III [abit-usa.com] or the new revision of the Iwill Slocket II [iwillusa.com] will both do dual FC-PGA Coppermine out of the box. Some popular slightly older slotkets like the MSI BX Master rev 2 and the Soltek SL-02A+ can be modified for dual Cu with a bit of soldering.

    You might still be able to use a Cu on other motherboards with the Soltek SL-02D [soltek.com.tw], which draws its power from a drive connector and provides the right Cu voltage through its own voltage regulator, even if the motherboard can't provide it. Unfortunately, this slotket is not yet dual capable.
  • They wanted to add more cache than they could affordably fit onto one die, and thus into one chip. They had before done socket chips with external cache, the pentium pros, but they were large and unwieldly.

    Now they refined the manufacturing processes again to allow them to fit the cache on die and they're going back to the much cheaper, better, socket design.

    The slot cost more because it was bigger, required a seperate PCB, and a bunch of components required to make seperate chips interoperate. The socket chip avoids all of this, not only making it cheaper, but allowing it to dissipate all of its heat through one small plate, instead of three seperate ones. Much more easily cooled, thus higher yields. And it's also easier to strap a big fan onto a socket chip than a slot one, and the important thing is that the fan, the big part, points away from the board.

    And yeah, the K6-3 was nice, a lot of K6-2s are supposedly 3s which were remarked and had some features removed at the silicon level, because people were more willing to buy the 2s than the 3s. Weird.
  • Exactly what video card do you have that will work that far outside of spec?
  • The hardware RNG is a much better source of entropy than any other source on your machine, including your Sound Blaster. You can just get more randomness from it in less time. I wish they'd allow access to the raw ouput so we could do a full assesment.

    And the serial number *was* a Bad Thing. People change NIC etc too often to reliably track them through it, and *lots* of people won't have NICs at all. Processors are far more reliable for this job. And there's sort of an excuse for those serial numbers, whereas there was never a plausible excuse for the CPUID.
    --
  • So, are they going to stick to the Slot 2 format for the Xeons, then? I'd love to see a dual or quad FCPGA motherboard.

    The Pentium Pros went from 256K all the way up to 1MB, which is pretty impressive, really. I remember all the articles about how Intel had poor yields on the Pros, especially the large cache chips. The 256k cache processors supposedly performed much worse than the 512k cache Pros, but I wonder how much of that was actually "benchmarketing" by Intel-friendly columnists.

    I don't see why Intel, with all its vaunted engineers, had to give up so quickly on Socket 8. It's another example of Intel's defeatist attitude, I suppose.

    Oh well. I've been thinking about grabbing a dual or quad processor PPro board, but so many of them are proprietary, it's an exercise in intense research to make an informed purchase.

    Maybe I'll try to set up a cluster of two or three Athlons. I wonder if it would be worth it?
  • ...had nothing to do with privacy, or consumer preference tracking, or software copy-protection.

    It was to give the system support people an easy way of doing inventory, even remotely. Accounting wants to know what happened to that new expensive machine? Ask the network where processor #foo is, and find out.

    (For those of you who think that's a completely stupid idea, I not-so-respectfully suggest you try working for an organization that requires equipment inventories. The ID scheme would have done away with those stupid little tags that get stuck on computers.)

    It was only when the marketing groups of the world got hold of the idea and said, "Hey, what else can we track besides inventory... people! People and their purchases! Neat!" that the idea went downhill.

    Elbereth speaks the truth; hardware addresses are already unique.
  • Realistically, I highly doubt that they lost many sales due to the serial number. Especially since most motherboard companies are using BIOSes that can disable it.

    So I wonder if internally some intel employees were citing the serial number as part of the cause of their slowly slipping stranglehold on the x86 processor market. If that's the case, some person or people are going to be left looking pretty foolish when AMD continues to thrive even after the elimination of that pesky serial number.

    cot.
  • You could try www.bp6.com [bp6.com].

    ~~~

  • Try searching for "slockets" or "slokets" etc - they go for usually about $20 a piece - check to make sure they are SMP PIII capable and handle the right voltages. If your mother board is older and you are running PIIs you might need a 'PIII BIOS upgrade'

  • You mean Celeron Cu's, or P-III Cu's?

    Is the BP-6 that good at dual processors, that you'd use it instead of a dual slot A board? I thought dual P-III mobos were only $20 more than the BP-6.

    If anyone has links about the BP-6, please post. I'm considering buying one.

    You can't use dual Slot A boards. They don't exist. The Athlon chipsets suck right now. Of course, that's mostly because VIA writes horrid chipsets.

    If you want a real dual processor board, don't go with Abit. Abit makes cheap, four layer boards. You want something like Asus, Tyan, or Supermicro. They will cost more, but you get what you pay for, especially when it comes to motherboards. I learned my lesson a long time ago... if it's cheap, it's because they cut corners.

    I'm using an Asus P2B-D, with is dual Slot 1. It supports up to 600 MHz Pentium III (Katmai) processors. Recent revisions of the P2B-D will also support 100 MHz FSB Coppermine processors (ie, the 500e, 550e, 600e, 650, 700, and 750). It will support the 133 MHz Coppermines (ie, 533eb, 600eb, 667, 733, 800, 866).

    Get a Tyan or Supermicro i840 board if you want upgradability. i840 has some problems (like using a MTH, which slows down performance), but if you put two 733 MHz Coppermine processors in there, you'll smoke just about anything that AMD will be releasing in the next 12 months.
  • Trying to get around the current lack of cheapo Slot 1 CPUs on the market (I tend to buy 20-40 at a time - and suddenly everything dried up) I tried out some of the FGPGA-to-Slot1 kits on the market - I tried 2 both claimed 'SMP' but neither delivered .... seems my PIIIs are the problem after all - hey Intel do you do exchanges?

    How on earth am I going to buy CPUs mailorder and get the right microcode? none of the online stores are set up to handle buying a particular uCode rev - it's pretty hit or miss - Intel needs to have these fixed CPUs out with a different SKU number if people want to be able to order them reliably - in the mean time I'm waiting for SMP Athlons - if this Intel-drought continues for much longer I'll jump to AMD asap

  • First, you can get true random numbers from software. Just sample the line-in from the SoundBlaster.
    How exactly is that a true random number from software if you take a sample from the sound hardware?

    ~~~

  • We want Dual PIII boxes for cheap. Intel has listened and responded.

    Actually, dual boxes are boring... what I want is an inexpensive 4-way system with a well scaling and fast bus architecture. ;)

    Anyway, you're right about competition being good for consumer, but for some reason it just hasn't happened here, yet. Ever since Athlon's breakthrough, I've been waiting (in vain) for Intel to announce price-cuts.

    I don't quite understand why, as it is obvious that Intel should be cutting their chip prices now. With AMD ramping up its production of chips costing only about 50-75% as compared to Intel processors, Intel is going to lose. They are not going to lose only chunks of the low-end market, but when AMD multiprocessor mobos arrive they are also going to get hurt in the high-end market. And in the long run that's where I think it's going to hurt them the most. Unless, of course, they cut their prices. This recent confusion about PIII SMP-capability and the mess with i820 doesn't do them any good, either.

  • Wow--this makes me feel so much better knowing that my ASUS dual PIII box will work now.

    The machine has only been up and running linux, apache and sybase for over a year at this point.

    Whew--what's next, an announcement that the Pentium Pro can be used in an SMP environment as well?

    What is the reasoning behind this? Something to distinguish the PIII from the Celeron or (more likely) the Athlon?

    Interested in the Colorado Lottery?
    Check out colotto.com [colotto.com]
    ---
    Interested in the Colorado Lottery?

  • Hah! (Score:2)

    by BJH ( 11355 )

    Screw the PIII - some on-line stores are giving prices for the AMD Spitfire (also known by the moniker of Duron):

    600MHz - $US89
    650MHz - $US115
    700MHz - $US159

    Kinda makes the days when a PII/400 was over a thousand dollars seem pretty crazy, huh?
  • Which slotkets did you try? Only very few, such as the Abit Slotket III [abit-usa.com] and the Iwill Slocket II [iwillusa.com] will do dual FC-PGA out of the box. Some others can be modified [positivelypaul.com]. This should get you dual even with older cA2 steppings, except for 500 and 550 Mhz chips.
  • You'd still have to filter the signal to get rid of 60 Hz line hum and other regular components (fans, hard drive, ...).

    Go nuclear and fix up a radiation detector to your serial-port! Besides the noise being truly random, the setup is also something that only a true geek would consider building.

    Of course, if you want something less exotic, you can use network traffic, video memory, etc. to feed the enthropy pool.

  • Intel is terrified of the Durons and Thunderbirds about to hit the market. That explains this move. The Thunderbirds are going to smoke PIII -- but they don't do SMP yet. (Actually, for all I know the CPUs themselves do, but there is no chipset to support it so it does not matter.)

    So expect to see some FUD soon about how only Intel can provide the true high end, SMP solution. Regardless of the fact that SMP is worthless for 99% of what people do with computers. (Don't take this the wrong way -- I have dual celeron -- just to say that most people run '95 or '98, and of those few who run NT or something better, most of the time they are surfing the web or editting text.)

    What is ironic about this, is that Intel has no competitive SMP solution itself. Sure, you can use i840 -- and pay out the nose for RDRAM. And the performance is *still* not up to that provided by the BX chipset.

    But BX, even though it is still the best performing chipset on the market (SMP or otherwise), is not really a viable modern solution for SMP, either. BX runs hot at dual 100; I have air piped directly over it from the intake fan. If/when I try for more, I will probably need to stick a fan on it. And of course, going above 100Mhz is not supported AGPwise on any BX board, nor even PCIwise on most.

    But none of that will stop Intel. "Only genuine Intel is fit for the real high end!"

  • Note my use of the word many. Perhaps I should have used significant. I imagine that the number is much larger than one but is still a very small fraction of their total number of sales.

    I really think that this is the sort of thing 99% of computer buyers don't even know about. It got virtually no mainstream press.
  • Most every merchant supports the option to add a message with your order, such as "I need stepping XXX". If they ignore it, just send the chip back and find another merchant.

    Not the ideal solution, but time will straighten out the kinks.

  • Some felt that the BIOS switch was not secure enough. The serial number can also be reactivated from Windows with a utility that Intel provides, but it requires a reboot before it goes into operation. Here [berkeley.edu]'s a rundown of the whole serial number thing. Theoretically, the number might be switched on again without the user's knowledge and then invisbly read after the next restart. Personally I'm not at all concerned about the PSN, though.
  • No this is not flamebait. If you have an ethernet card in your machine (as do I) you already have a globally unique number that most people can read at will. (Look up MAC address or check out www.grc.com.)

    Why no fuss about that?


    ...................

    ... paka chubaka

  • At least it has been so since the P90 or so. But I think the era of centralised planning within the Intel kremlin is over, road maps that tell us all where we'll be and how much we'll be paying in 5 years no longer suffice. They're in the trenches and taking shots as they see them.

    It's the FC-PGA format that got their engineers a bit confused. Someone noticed some socket chips coming through the assembly line and his first reaction was uhh it looks like a Celeron and he instinctively scrambled for the neuter button. In the meanwhile he's been properly briefed and now he knows only to aim at Coppermine128 cores. And should anyone notice well hey we can always publish an Errata or something.
  • imho, don't bother.

    PPros were cool chips, but for their time. Even if you could setup a quad PPro 233 (how high did they go) system and get it setup, it wouldn't be as fast as a dual celeron box if all you wanted was raw cycles, and the celerons have FPU tweaks which would make them better at rendering.

    And if you need the huge cache and want to do server type things with them, then buy a Xeon now, they're fairly cheap, only $200 above a regular P3 when you count the special board and all, and with its much higher clockspeed it'll kick whatever you could do with the older CPUs.
  • Well then you could have a simple easy to use unique ID : convenient for authentification over a network (Intel advertised it as an help for e-commerce and secure communications).
  • There's been a lot of noise about Athlon not being able to do SMP. But the truth is that P3 cannot do it either. The last chipset that was able to do SMP was BX. But Intel has phased it out in favour of *ghm* i820 and i840. These ones don't do SMP. And now they are under recall. Not to mention that they totally suck because of the Rambus RAM interface. Great job, Intel!

    The only P3 chipset right now (aside from BX) that is actually worth anything is VIA's. But it doesn't do SMP either.

    Sure, you could get Xeon if you need SMP, but it costs an arm and a leg, and lags in CPU clock compared to P3/Athlon (is it still stuck at 700MHz or did they release a faster one?).

    So Intel is just as bad in the SMP department as AMD. In fact, I would argue that AMD is better. At least they have not screwed up their existing chipsets trying to push some overpriced proprietary memory. AMD says they'll have SMP by the end of the year. When that happens, AMD will wipe the floor with Intel.


    ___
  • Dumb shmuck, I've been running my P3-550E @ 880Mhz for months with conventional cooling. Yes, that's 160Mhz FSB.

    Before posting stupid drivel, try to read up on some info.
  • I tried the IWill and Soyo parts - neither worked (carefull reading of the IWill slocket II box sais that "Celeron SMP" is supported - while their web page sais "Dual FPGA" is supported).

    As I said in my posting I now suspect the problem is with the PIIIs and not the slotkets (for the record I was using them in a SuperMicro P6DBE that happily runs SMP with normal slot1 PIIIs)

  • It's called the Pentium Pro.
  • The older Iwill Slocket II will need modification. All Slocket IIs after Iwill's recent dual FC-PGA support announcement have had the wire mod done at the factory.
  • When that happens, AMD will wipe the floor with Intel intel still has market and mindshare with the BX boards. AMD will have a very hard time competing against the aging BX chipset since it can still hold its own against i8xx boards.

    Unless the Duron is extremely spectacular, I doubt that existing Athlon owners will run out and buy a new board for it. new pc builders need apply (or people with lots of money to throw around) Think about it.. you just bought a dang motherboad for the Athlon, you really wanna shell out more for a new board?
  • My claim is that you can sample any hardware, really. Sound cards, hard drive accesses, keyboard input, or whatever.

    You need to be careful about it though. Guttman did a paper a few years ago "Software Generation of Practically Strong Random Numbers", and he found that taking input from the sound input produced very little entropy in some cases. OTOH, /dev/random does a pretty good job, hashing in all keyboard and mouse interupts, along with a timestamp. Dedicated hardware is still cool, though.
  • just call and ask. I did, and got the stepping I needed for a dual.
  • I put to you that it would be as easy to change your pentium number as it is to change your mac address. (Although I question your assertion that a Chimp can do any of this.)


    ...................

    ... paka chubaka

  • Thats all fine and dandy...
    But I've been waiting for Athlon SMP for a year now....
    Now *that* would be sweet validation.
  • Don't worry dude, good things are worth the wait. :)

    Although I'll probably end up buying two coppermines anyway, for my BP-6. (with converters)

    :)

    I guess dual Athlons would be my project for next year.

  • Thank god (Score:3)

    by geekd ( 14774 ) on Friday May 19, 2000 @10:59PM (#1060084) Homepage
    Intel has come to thier senses.

    For the past 6 months, I have rejoiced, silently, every time good news about AMD came out.

    "AMD grosses $1 Billon"

    and also celebrated when Intel had a screw up

    "Intel recalls 840 chipset"

    This is not because I hate Intel. I like Intel. The Pentium family of chips has revolutionized home computing. I have a dual celeron machine (BP6) that I am typing on right now. I have a P II 450 machine at work that rulez.

    But, Competition is good

    If AMD wasn't putting the screws on Intel, then they wouldn't give a damn what the consumer wants. They'd be as bad as Microsoft. But, with AMD giving Intel real competition, things couldn't be better in PC hobbyist land. Chips are cheap as all hell, and there is real choice in the market.

    And Intel is forced to pay attention to what we want. We want Dual PIII boxes for cheap. Intel has listened and responded.

    The free market rules, when there is competition.

    -geekd

  • When the serial # was announced... (Score:3)

    by Sir_Winston ( 107378 ) on Friday May 19, 2000 @11:02PM (#1060085)
    ...there was good news, too. People who valued their privacy, and wanted to be viewed as more than "consumers" tied to a number, found solace in Intel's other announcement about the P!!!. Intel said when announcing the serial #'s that they'd also be implementing in a later stepping a hardware Random Number Generator. Privacy advocates praised that as much as they [expletive deleted] the dreaded Internet-readable serial #. Those new P!!!'s, originally due out late last year, were supposed to include a sensor to read "thermal noise," the completely random motion of atomic particles, and make those random values available to encryption applications. The importance of this is that truly random numbers cannot be calculated in software, they can only be approximated in software, through the use of "pseudo-random number generators." Those PRNGs are currently one of the weakest points (theoretically, at least) in implementing crypto, because a flaw in the "randomness" of their numbers could render encrypted data vulnerable. But natural phenomena like the motion of atoms is truly random, and the proposed Intel sensor would have therefore contributed substantially to the security of data. And yet, nothing has been heard of it since early last year, when it was announced along with the CPU IDs. The most likely scenario is that the utter backlash against the CPU serial #s caused Intel to completely drop its strategy of integrating "e-commerce" and data security features, which is a shame because hardware random number generation would have been almost as big a step forward for privacy as the CPU ID was a step back. But I still like to think that the NSA had something to do with it, and mutter under my breath "Damn gubbmint, takin' ma guns and ma crypto..." ;-)
  • I knew someone would challenge me on that statement, but I was too lazy to go back and reword it.

    The original poster's claim was that you need dedicated hardware in order to get true random numbers. My claim is that you can sample any hardware, really. Sound cards, hard drive accesses, keyboard input, or whatever.

    It's easy.
  • It's incredibly difficult to do quad processing without a proprietary motherboard and/or case. The huge quad Xeon motherboards from Supermicro seem to be fairly standard; at least, they fit in the SC750A and SC760A cases, which are actually OEM Addtronics cases. (Check the Addtronics web site for details.)

    There's an auction on eBay right now for a six-way Pentium Pro server, fully loaded, with all proprietary riser cards, proprietary case, and RedHat Linux 6.0. It looks interesting. I might bid on it, even though getting six VRMs will cost me a fortune! Not to mention paying for six 512K cache Pentium Pros...

    Oh well. What good is cash if you just save it up?

    p.s. AMD is never going to be anything more than a thorn in Intel's side. Intel is too big, too well-established, and too rich to suffer more than minor setbacks. But I like AMD a lot. I think AMD will become very profitable and carve themselves a nice niche in the x86 market: gamers and enthusiasts. This is a very good niche to have. Gamers and enthusiasts will spend big money to upgrade their processors every few months.

    In my opinion, the best case scenario for AMD is that they take over 25% of the market: the low end, games and enthusiasts, and entry-level workstations (if AMD can ever manage to write an SMP chipset, like they promised a year ago).
  • Hopefully, from now on the Athlon will be remembered as the Intel Serial-Killer.

    All right, that's enough outta me... off to bed before somebody pokes an eye out.

  • You mean Celeron Cu's, or P-III Cu's?

    Is the BP-6 that good at dual processors, that you'd use it instead of a dual slot A board? I thought dual P-III mobos were only $20 more than the BP-6.

    If anyone has links about the BP-6, please post. I'm considering buying one.

  • Damn. I meant to say, "it will NOT support 133 MHz FSB Coppermines". Repeat, the P2B-D will never support 133 MHz FSB Coppermines. It's a limitation of the BX chipset. Sorry.

  • Re:When the serial # was announced... (Score:3)

    by Elbereth ( 58257 ) on Friday May 19, 2000 @11:16PM (#1060091) Journal
    You're half right about most of the points you raised.

    First, you can get true random numbers from software. Just sample the line-in from the SoundBlaster. It's vaguely possible that you'll get repeating values, due to the noise from the case fan(s), but I doubt that's really a concern for most people. This is the Wintel architecture, here.

    Second, Intel did implement the hardware RNG. It's in the i810(e), i820, and i840 chipsets. It was never supposed to be on the CPU itself. There's no way to get hardware RNG on a BX chipset.

    CPU IDs are mostly harmless... your computer has ten other hardware-generated, unique IDs in it already. What do you think the hard drive serial number is? Read the docs on your NIC. Etc, etc.

    Ignorant paranoia.
  • Actually, what really killed off the idea of the CPU serial number was the fact that _Microsoft_ was not going to support that feature in Windows 98, NT 4.0 and 2000. You can hate Microsoft all you want, but when 85% of the OS market is not interested in the CPU serial number, that other 15% isn't going to be interested, either.
  • To quote the article at gamepc : "VIA's dual processor solution is still quite a while away"

    Don't tell that to Tyan [tyan.com]. They've got the dual coppermine mobo with a VIA chipset ready to go.

    This is supposed to ship within days, and there are a dozen vendors [ibuyer.net] which are set to have it. I was quoted a date of May 20, but that may have slipped. Egghead says they have 1000 on order.

    140 bucks for an SMP mobo?! The only question is how do you get a Tyan to overclock. The answer usually is, "you don't". But they are usually extremely stable, so it's amazing they are using VIA!

    kabloie

  • More room for multiprocessors??? (Score:3)

    by gklyber ( 5133 ) on Saturday May 20, 2000 @02:17AM (#1060094)
    "FC-PGA processors are going to be all the rage in multiprocessor environments, there's no doubt about it. After all, they're small (room for more processors in crowded spaces), create less heat (smaller heatsinks, also good for crowded systems), and cheaper than Slot-1 chips, they also perform exactly the same as their larger Slot-1 counterparts."

    Wasn't one of the advertised Slot-1 advantages the ability to put more in for multiprocessing because now the chip was vertical? Now they're saying back to the traditional chip socket form is better for more processors. What gives?

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