
The Story of a 6-CPU Server from 1997 - sohkamyung
http://www.cpushack.com/2019/01/12/mini-mainframe-at-home-the-story-of-a-6-cpu-server-from-1997/
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fps_doug
I have an unexplainable fascination with that CPU too. A couple years ago I
picked up an old workstation with two PPro 200 (256k). The 168pin EDO RAM is
very hard to come by these days, especially as the manual says my machine
accepts unbuffered RAM only, and most EDORAM listings on ebay back then didn't
even bother say whether they are or not.

I've read elsewhere that Pentium Pros have been bought up left and right
during the last decade or so since they have a lot of gold content, which is
kind of sad from a nerd's perspective. I'd like to have a matching pair of the
1MB model, but they're super rare and crazy expensive if they pop up at all.
The 512k ones are still available, but most sellers nowadays advertise these
CPUs for their gold content, so they don't bother to list details like the
stepping, which you'd want to know if you're building an SMP system.

Regarding the article, it was a great read, although I couldn't really
understand why they were going for Win2003 instead of Win2000. Getting it to
work seemed to take several months; finding older versions of the software
you'd want to run sounds like a much simpler solution, just like they
mentioned for WinRAR. I guess it was one of these "because I can" decisions.
:-)

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jerrysievert
I remember my great excitement of receiving a pair of matched pentium pro
processors (200mhz!) as a gift from a group at intel (I worked tirelessly for
one of the vendors that group was using at the time). I purchased a dual p-pro
motherboard and fired it up.

it was pretty impressive for the time, especially as a home machine, but it
wasn't until virtualization became mainstream that something like that really
became useful for me. it ended up running my web servers, mail, and mailing
lists for quite a while, but was eventually retired for an e250.

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taspeotis
Related discussion [1]

    
    
        Mini-Mainframe at Home: A 6-CPU Server from 1997 (cpushack.com)
        20 points by protomyth 16 hours ago | 9 comments
    

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18893415](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18893415)

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walrus01
The general architecture for dual socket Pentium Pro CPUs was also reused with
minor upgrades/modifications for the first generation of slot mounted Xeons
(actually just relabeled Pentium 2 CPUs sold at a higher price).

If I recall correctly the Intel 440FX northbridge chipset on the motherboards
supported either dual P-Pro or dual P2.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_440FX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_440FX)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_II#Klamath](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_II#Klamath)

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rayiner
PII Xeons were not relabeled PII’s. They had a full speed cache bus while the
PII had a half speed one.

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saltcured
Kind of tangential, but the title and premise reminded me of an earlier x86
SMP platform:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequent_Computer_Systems#Symme...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequent_Computer_Systems#Symmetry)

~~~
jerrysievert
Sequent was awesome, but damn if I didn't hate their OS's, they reminded me
too much of Domain/OS. They were acquired by IBM a while back, and their HQ is
now Nike. The OSDL was based in one of the old Sequent data centers for a
while, and it managed to bring on a few Sequent kernel developers to help
remove kernel locks throughout linux.

