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anyone using multi cpu mothetboards?

I have quite a few in my collection. Oldest is a dual Pentium 1 board, a few dual P2/P3 boards. Have quite a few dual Opteron boards in use plus a dual 4core XEON board. Oh an a couple dual Athlon MP.

Dual CPU boards tend to be the best built of their generation but also tend to be huge (E-ATX). Mostly Tyan and Supermicro brands.
 
By "multi-CPU", do you mean more than one processor of the same type or a system that uses different CPUs (e.g. DEC Rainbow 100)?

Both exist.
 
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no I don't, not dual cpu machines

yes I do, my mac LC2 has a 68030 as its main and a 6502 in the form of a apple IIe card as a secondary option
 
Older system with 2x Slot 1 Pentium 3 500Mhz processors, Asus PC-DL based system with Dual Xeon processors, PowerMac G5 Quad (2 dual-core G5 2.5Ghz) and Mac Pro 4.1 2x Quad-core 2.26 Xeon processors. Also have a Apple II with a Z80 card if you want to count that.

I recycled an old Gateway dual socket 370 cpu last time I moved. Couldn't take it with me and couldn't find anyone that wanted it.
 
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I have a Sun Blade 2000 with dual 1GHz UltraSPARC-IIi CPUs in it. Still need to get a decent assortment of software on it, though. Also, my Power Mac G4 MDD was originally a dual-processor configuration, though I dropped it down to a single-CPU module to resolve some instability due to overheating.
 
Dual Opteron quad-core Linux workstation, Dual Xeon 1U server (mid-2005 vintage), Dual Pentium-III Tyan Tiger 100 system.

Apple IIgs (65C816) with PC transporter (NEC V30), technically dual 65C816, though one is not connected (Zip GSX installed, original CPU stored in socket on Zip GSX).
 
I currently have two machines with dual CPUs.

My oldest is a Super Micro P3TDDE with two PIII-S 1400s and 2 GB of RAM.

The other is a Super Micro X5DPL-iGM with two 3.2 GHz 604 Xeons and 8 GB of RAM. I'm looking to get rid of this one because it's a massive power hog. Just idling it sucks like 500W from the 6 SCSI drives and the 110W TDP CPUs.
 
I have a number of boards. Dual socket 7, socket 8, socket 370, PII and one dual PIII Xeon board from Asus. There's also an HP Kayak machine buried somewhere that hangs after POST. Still need to look into that.
Actually, right now I'm working on that dual Socket 8 machine. It needs a new CMOS battery but it's just about ready to take an install.

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I've never understood the dual 486 and Pentium machines. 9x couldn't handle it. OS/2 couldn't yet either. It was either Unix, Xenix or a really, really early version of Linux and even then the CPUs were not designed for SMP in mind yet.
 
Had a dual CPU PIII motherboard inside a HP Netserver. Used to run 2x PIII 800's on it under Linux acting as a somewhat NAS device. Even upgraded it with a PCI SATA card to add modern hard drives.

In the end it died; wouldn't POST or give any signs of life. I replaced it with the cheapest Core 2 Duo I could get at the time and installed FreeNAS. Best thing I ever did as now I can transfer files at gigabit speeds rather than ~200 megabits.

Still have the board and case somewhere. If I run out of projects in 30 years time I might take a look at it again as I can't say it holds much interest. As some people have already pointed out most software/OS's back in the day didn't really use the 2nd processor.
 
I tossed my multi cpu boards years ago. I had dual pentium (gigabyte ga586dx) dual p6 (tyan titan pro) dual celeron (abit bp6) and dual pentium 2 (supermicro p6dbe) over the years, running winnt. All were working boards when I retired them. I think the supermicro had p3-800s or some such, which i sold on fleabay for a profit (when 100mhz fsb high clock p3 was getting scarce) then fitted p2-450s on it and donated it to computer recycling centre (when they still had drop off location on Caribbean Dr in Sunnyvale near weirdstuff)
 
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I use a dual P3 Supermicro board, mostly because it'll take 2GB ECC DRAM and has ISA slots. Other than that, I don't know why I'd be using it. It certainly seems to add little to the performance of XP.
 
Lots of multi-CPU PowerPC systems all the way from a BeBox 133 (dual 133MHz 603) to a Quad G5 (two-CPU dual-core PowerPC 970), as well as a dual-CPU PA-RISC (C8000, PA-8900).

I have a number of multicore systems but these technically are single-CPU, and I don't have any multi-CPU x86 systems.
 
I've never owned one but have always been fascinated by the Atari ATW8000 computers using multiple CPUs. I suppose if I'm going to go all out though, a Cray of sorts is in order. Would love one of those!
 
3pcedev said:
Had a dual CPU PIII motherboard inside a HP Netserver. Used to run 2x PIII 800's on it under Linux acting as a somewhat NAS device. Even upgraded it with a PCI SATA card to add modern hard drives.
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I had an LH3 model that was pretty kick butt. Used it to beta test .NET Server which became Windows Server 2003. Did multi-proc pretty well.
 
NeXT said:
I've never understood the dual 486 and Pentium machines. 9x couldn't handle it. OS/2 couldn't yet either. It was either Unix, Xenix or a really, really early version of Linux and even then the CPUs were not designed for SMP in mind yet.
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Both the 486 and the Pentium had support for SMP instruction-wise, which is what the LOCK "F0" prefix is for in assembly; It prevents two processors from interfering with the same bit of memory.

The reason that dual 486 and Pentium motherboards were rare is because Intel didn't have a SMP chipset for either, which forced 3rd parties to develop their own in-house designs. This made such a design extremely expensive and risky as such a design didn't really have a market segment back in those days.
 
Didn't NT 3.51 and NT 4 support systems with dual 486 and or dual Pentium 1's? I haven't tried my dual P1 board on NT yet, still need a case for it (but I do own retail versions of NT 3.5.1 and 4.0).

I would think most of the dual 486 systems did have a custom OS.

One of the good thing about most dual CPU motherboards is you get plenty of RAM slots and ECC server RAM can be found super cheap these days.
 
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