Maurice Kinal wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:

 RT> Back around 1999 or 2000 or thereabouts,  when I was working at that
 RT> computer store in the area building systems,  this one guy there came
 RT> up with a board,  I think he'd found it on ebay or something.  I'm not
 RT> sure if it would've supported PIII or not,  though it did have two of
 RT> those kinds of slots.  _And_ it had all sorts of other stuff built on
 RT> to that MB,  including _three_ SCSI channels,  two regular ones and
 RT> one "wide".  And back then,  he ended up paying something
like $75 for
 RT> that board,  which was way less than what was typical for what those
 RT> guys were paying for MBs in those days.

 MK> That is cheap, even by today's prices.  A decent SMP S370 board,
 MK> with decent chipsets, SCSII, raid, 133MHz fsb (for the PIIIs), I
 MK> have seen going for over $100 USD, much, much more then that if
 MK> they have both PIII's with the board.

This didn't include any CPUs with it,  and I don't recall about the
chipsets.  My recollection seems to indicate that it may have shown up on
ebay,  or something of the sort,  I remember some specific number of these
being mentioned as being available,  but I don't think they got more than
just the one.

 RT> I might have snagged one,  but didn't care to lock myself into intel
 RT> stuff,  since I tend to favor AMD over intel.  Still do.  And if I go
 RT> beyond the hardware I have now,  I'll probably get something with an
 RT> AMD chip on it.

 MK> I wouldn't for SMP.

No?  Some of the rackmount stuff I see advertised in Linux Journal seems to use it.

 MK> From what I've seen the PIII's are the best for multiprocessing.

They're also the ones that introduces the processor serial number or
whatever it was.  That's part of what put even *more* of a bias against
that company in my perceptions than anytning else.

 MK> I don't really care much for the socket A SMP boards, not that I 
 MK> have one.  For what I see going on the a-one servers PIII's seem 
 MK> to be the way to go.  However, certain Intel chipsets they can 
 MK> keep but you I've seen a few S370 SMP boards that really shine.  
 MK> Like anything, buyer beware.

Yeah.  Not that I'm really pushing toward SMP anyhow,  at this point or for
the near-term as far as I can see.  I don't have any particular reason to
go there just yet.

 MK> As for AMD the last 32-bit CPU I like was the K6-2, and they don't
 MK> multiprocess although I once thought a cluster of them would be
 MK> pretty cool.  However it is difficult to find decent Super 7 boards
 MK> (100MHz FSB).  Too many crappy ones of those.

Yeah,  apparently.

 MK> Anyhow I can wait as there is a bigger fish to fry at the moment. 
 MK> Who knows?  I just might decide to cluster a bunch of MachZ's or
 MK> Transmetta Crusoe's.  The low power consumption would make it 
 MK> possible to build a tiny, power conservative super computer. 
 MK> Expensive but way cheaper then a Cray in both start up and runtime
 MK> costs. :-)

 MK> That actually might be fun.

:-)

---