Subject: Re: Intel Providence dual P6 motherboard
To: Laine Stump <laine@morningstar.com>
From: Jason Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov>
List: current-users
Date: 03/22/1997 10:48:16
On Sat, 22 Mar 1997 11:50:50 -0500 (EST) 
 Laine Stump <laine@MorningStar.Com> wrote:

 > Intel has an ATX form dual P6 motherboard with an integrated 10/100
 > ethernet, 7880 UW SCSI controller, and some kind of sound card. The
 > board w/o CPU is $579 in Computer Shopper; if you subtract $150 for the
 > ethernet and $200 for the SCSI, that comes out to just over $200 for a
 > dual CPU mboard with a 16 bit sound card - not bad.

...yah, that ain't bad at all...

 > I think somebody recently asked about the SCSI controller on this
 > board, and the answer was that it was as good as a 2940UW, right? Is it
 > *exactly* equivalent, or just "almost"?

It's the same chip family .. the ahc driver ought to work with it
just fine.

 > I'm also interested in the ethernet (some Intel chipset). Is there a
 > driver for this in -current? Has anyone tried it? (Someone else here at
 > the office just bought one and said that he couldn't make the ethernet
 > work with Linux...)

Intel chipset... it's probably EtherExpress Pro/100 PCI.  Is the
chip an 82557?  FreeBSD has a driver for this that I've considered
porting in the past... dg recently shook some bugs out of it, so maybe
I'll Just Do It rsn and send them back diffs to make it NetBSD-aware.

 > And what about the sound card (I don't remember what chipset it was)?

...probably a PnP Soundblaster chipset...

 > Oh, and what about the 2nd CPU socket??? ;-)

...Oh, you'll have to stay tuned for that... (I'm motivated to use the
2nd CPU on all the dual-P6s at work :-)

Jason R. Thorpe                                       thorpej@nas.nasa.gov
NASA Ames Research Center                               Home: 408.866.1912
NAS: M/S 258-6                                          Work: 415.604.0935
Moffett Field, CA 94035                                Pager: 415.428.6939