On 25 Sep 2002 09:05:00 -0500, Herb Peyerl wrote:
> I received 6 requests to summarize back to the mailing list, my initial
> request for dual-cpu motherboard recommendations.
> 
> My summary is:
> 
> I received no recommendations.

We are beginning to use MSI 6501 Dual Athlon MP mbs. We have about
120 or so of them and are ordering a bunch more soon, but I've only
run NetBSD 1.6 on two of them and don't have enough time on them
for a recommendation. We are currently running solaris86 on most
of them, but looking at NetBSD for the near future.

Observations:

Don't try to use apm :^). apm completely destabilizes the cpus.
After I disabled apm, NetBSD was rock-solid on these boxes.

And we are experiencing differences of opinion between what the
bios reads for cpu temperatures and what the lm driver reads. I'm
working on trying to figure out what is going on there right now.

Other than that, these boxes are the fastest things we have seen.
They computationally outrun our new 8cpu Sun compute servers (even
with floating point).  Obviously they don't have the i/o bandwidth
that the Suns have, but we need cpu 'bandwidth' more, and the AMD
MP's (1800's) are a lot faster with our jobs.

Adequate cooling has been our major concern, so take care to find
an adequate case and cpu fans that can properly move air. We tried
three cases before the current ones, but then we have unusual
requirements.