>At 05:00 PM 2/27/98 +0100, Mick asked:
>>1. I have seen in a few PC mags the 'dual pentium' MOBO's. Is it be possible
>>to get a MOBO that will accept 2 standard Pentium processors?
>>2. Is it possible to use a combination of a standard P166 and say a P200mmx?
>>and would that give a processor of speed of 366 or is there more to it than
>>that?
>
And at 12:20 27-02-98 -0700, Bob wrote:
>(1)Yes...
>(2) No. The processors do not function this way.  In a dual processor board
>the two (2) processors must be matched.  They do not become twice as
>fast, but rather they will do twice the number of calculations...  or in the
>instance of a server it allows them to do twice the work on one motherboard.
>It normally is a waste as a client machine, (personal computer), unless you
>are using a processing intensive application such as a CAD program or
>other upscale graphics application.


It should be mentioned that not only must the speeds of the processors be
matched on a dual processor motherboard, but also the "steppings".
These are different revisions released during the time that a certain speed
processor is manufactured. It would be rather unlikely that you could easily
find a matching 166 MHZ pentium processor after (say) a year. (Actually the
steppings must be within one step of each other.)

Also, SMP (symmetric multi-processing) can only be taken advantage of if the
operating system supports it. WinNT and some Unixes do; Win95 and DOS do not.
While different programs running at the same time on a SMP capable system can
use different processors, for one program to take advantage of it, this
program must be multithreaded. Not all programs are.

Regards,
Bill