Finding the Limits of the Socket 8
Socket 8 processors have something magical and I really enjoy working with them. Earlier I wrote about them more than once and it would seem that everything has already been said, but in this article you will find out which PC configuration is truly the fastest on Socket 8, although it never existed in reality. I just gave this platform what it never had, it’s like giving the first representatives of the Skylake processor architecture, which was released back in 2015, DDR5 and PCI-Express 4.0 today.
Before starting another fascinating story about Socket 8 and the processors that were installed there, I will give links to my previous experiments:
Chapter 2: Mini-Mainframe at Home: The Story of a 6-CPU Server from 1997
and what got us started…
Part 1: Mini-Mainframe at Home: The Story of a 6-CPU Server from 1997
As you can see, my close acquaintance with this socket has existed for a long time and over the past few years we have clearly managed to make friends. It would seem that all Socket 8 processors have been studied and tested in various configurations, including an insane configuration of six processors in such a monster as the ALR Revolution 6×6. But quite recently I got my hands on a motherboard made by ASUS, which gave me the opportunity to take a fresh look at the use of processors and the performance they are able to give in a newer platform.
What is this board and what chipset is it based on? To name the heroine of today’s article, I will first dwell on the main chipsets for Socket 8 processors. The first chipsets for Intel Pentium Pro processors appeared in November of 1995, 25 years ago. Already at that time, they understood that the future was behind the parallel execution of various tasks. The Intel 450KX chipset, codenamed “Mars”, was introduced for workstations, and the Intel 450GX “Orion” for servers. Mars allowed for dual-processor configurations, and the Orion officially supported up to four physical processors. Although on the example of the super-server ALR Revolution 6×6, which is based on Intel 450GX, the number of processors could have been much larger and could easily double the official figure.
Nowadays the term chipset is often associated with a single chip located on the motherboard, but when applied to the first chipsets for Intel Pentium Pro processors, we are dealing with the physical seven chips that made up the “number of special chips” or “chipset.” These chipsets supported slow FPM DRAM standard RAM, the server GX chipset could operate with 4 GB of such memory, while the KX “was content” with 1 GB support (Intel figuring a workstations needed less RAM then a server). By the standards of the second half of the 90s, these were immense volumes of RAM
In May 1996, a more progressive chipset appeared – Intel 440FX “Natoma”, which quickly began to replace older system logic sets. Intel 440FX itself already consisted of a pair of microcircuits, support for SMP, faster EDO / BEDO DRAM memory types along with the outdated FPM DRAM (though limited to 1GB max of RAM), a new version (2.1) of the PCI bus standard, as well as support for Intel Pentium-II processors were announced.
Most motherboards based on the Intel 440FX “Natoma” chipset have a physical design in the form of a Socket, where the processor was installed, but there were exceptions with a few using the new Slot 1 slot, where the first Pentium-II and Pentium Pro were installed through special slot adapters. A good example is the ASUS KN97-X motherboard with the included Socket 8->Slot 1 adapter called the ASUS C-P6S1.
Each manufacturer of such slot motherboards produced their own slot adapters, but due to their small circulation, finding them is now problematic. Socket 8 processors feel good in such adapters and the presence of a more modern infrastructure of such motherboards obviously contributes to an increase in performance. But Intel, having released the Intel 440FX chipset, decided to stop further support for its Socket 8 processors, although it could really have extended their life cycle. Why just sell people a new motherboard chipset, when you cold ALSO force them to buy a new CPU to go in it?
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Boards and Systems