Your input requested: Scope of the Pentium subforum

[vwestlife]

There are many Pentium IIIs with ISA slots, as well. I have one sitting in the trunk of my car right now.

 

[Chuck(G)]

There are P4s with ISA slots, but be careful with either P4 and P3--some implementations don't support ISA 8-bit DMA all that well. Generally, 440BX/GX/LX chipsets are okay--the rest are "try before you buy".

 

[carangil]

There are many Pentium IIIs with ISA slots, as well. I have one sitting in the trunk of my car right now.

I stand corrected! I sort if skipped a generation of PCs. I had a k6-2, then I went Pentium III laptop. When I get back to desktop PCs ISA was gone.

but be careful with either P4 and P3--some implementations don't support ISA 8-bit DMA all that well

This is where ISA support gets dicey. It's just emulated crap by that point

 

[krebizfan]

I think the next clean demarcation line would be 2003/2004 with the introduction of AMD's 64-bit CPUs. That would mean the Pentium subforum would cover about 10 years. Pentium II, III, M, and the Athlon counterparts which often support working legacy parts are included. Okay, so is the early Pentium 4 line, but anyone dumpster diving for one probably would need help with the more obscure chipset flaws in those.

 

[lowen]

This is exactly my feelings as well. This is my defense of SS7 being vintage: Proper ISA slot support. ...

Proper ISA support is still available, albeit not in mainstream PCs.

The Super7 systems were intended in their day to directly compete with PPro and Pentium III. One could say that the higher-end K6-2's and K6-3's could compete with PIII to a degree. From a currently running, in-production system at one of my clients:

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor	: 0
cpu		: 586
model		: AMD-K6(tm) 3D processor
vendor_id	: AuthenticAMD
stepping	: M
fdiv_bug	: no
hlt_bug		: no
f00f_bug	: no
fpu		: yes
fpu_exception	: yes
cpuid		: yes
wp		: yes
flags		: fpu vme de pse tsc msr mce cx8 syscr pge mmx 3dnow
bogomips	: 999.42
[$

This system was an encoder system for RealAudio and still has an ISA Media Vision ProAudioSpectrum 16 sound card in it for that purpose.... I remember having to recompile the Linux 2.0.x kernel (Red Hat Linux 4.1) with support specifically for this sound card, with Alan Cox's help (he was the OSS open source sound card driver guru at the time.....)

And, yes, a migration is under way to get off of this system; it has run nearly continuously for a really long time (it was originally a dual PentiumPro, but was upgraded to a K6-2 back in 1999 or so and has run since then. It's running a relatively specialized application that is being ported to something more modern as that client can afford it.