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AMD Intel Technology Hardware

AMD and Intel CPUs Supported On Same Motherboard 212

Posted by CowboyNeal from the stupid-mobo-tricks dept.
Kez writes "We haven't seen AMD and Intel CPUs since Socket 7, but ECS have created a motherboard sporting both Intel LGA775 and AMD 939 sockets. An Intel chip will sit in the board itself, whereas an AMD chip can be used through a daughterboard. HEXUS.net has the scoop from CeBIT." While this is pretty slick, I do wonder who is actually gonna buy this board in place of their usual favorite, since it's not like people are swapping their processors around every chance they get, unless they don't actually use the computer they've built.
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AMD and Intel CPUs Supported On Same Motherboard More

AMD and Intel CPUs Supported On Same Motherboard

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  • dual... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by AmigaAvenger ( 210519 )
    mildly sweet, but what I want is a true dual proc with different types. (both running concurrently) the OS then could be smart enough to route certain tasks to whichever processor excels in that area, making for one VERY quick machine.

  • Solution looking for a problem (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bigtallmofo ( 695287 ) on Saturday March 12, 2005 @10:14AM (#11919222)
    Hexus seems very excited about this, and I guess if I were a hardware reviewer that was benchmarking chips it would be pretty handy to have an apples-to-apples comparison by using the same motherboard between AMD and Intel chips. Beyond that, I don't see many end users implementing this.

    • Re:Solution looking for a problem (Score:5, Interesting)

      by WillerZ ( 814133 ) on Saturday March 12, 2005 @10:20AM (#11919254) Homepage
      It isn't the same motherboard though. As far as I could tell from TFA the only shared bit are the PCI-E and PCI buses.

      I can't see it being cheaper to buy the AMD daughterboard than to buy a real AMD mobo - all this saves you is the hassle of moving your cards across.

      If you could use both at once it would be cool but as it is it seems extremely pointless.
      • That's what I'm seeing. If they wanted to support both chips, why didn't they just cut the MB in half and support the Intel proc the same way they do the AMD one?

        You buy the "lower half" of the board standard (I/O ports, SATA/IDE ports, expansion slots, etc) and then you can build a different "upper half" (Chip socket, RAM, northbridge, etc) for almost as many different processors as you like. Upgrading to a different proc would then be as easy as buying just a new upper half, and you wouldn't have to worr

        • Re:Solution looking for a problem (Score:4, Interesting)

          by swb ( 14022 ) on Saturday March 12, 2005 @11:24AM (#11919557)
          Why not take this one step further and have the "motherboard" be a bus backplane with your I/O ports and slots, and the daughterboards housing a CPU+RAM. Add in some NUMA and a VM achitecture and you could have an interesting system, kind of like a real computer.
          • Industrial PCs have been doing this for years... I have one at home sitting in a 4RU case.

            Inside the case is 2 x Celeron 366 systems. The CPU sits on a PCI card, has it's own RAM and 3-4 PCI/ISA slots dedicated to that CPU card. The 'mainboard' is basically a PCB with PCI & ISA slots on it. The PSU plugs into the mainboard, and both PCs run side by side in the one case.

            Handy to have 2 PCs for different OSs inside the same case, but getting kind of aged now. Don't know if they make these things for new
            • My Amiga 2000 works something like that as well. Internally, it has a 7~ MHz processor, but I've added a card that houses a 60 MHz processor and 60 MB ram. Quite nifty (and sadly, quite dated).
            • Blade type systems aren't really the same as what I was thinking as they lack the NUMA and (native) virtual machine capabilities that would make it truly interesting.

              Imagine a system with 4 video cards and 4 CPU cards in it. With NUMA and VM capabilities, it could be one 4-CPU system with a 4-head video system. Or two dual CPU systems with dual video. Or 4 systems. Or even more if you were willing to partition the 'smaller' systems through the VM with less access to the CPU.

              I honestly don't understa

        • Re:Solution looking for a problem (Score:4, Funny)

          by gad_zuki! ( 70830 ) on Saturday March 12, 2005 @12:16PM (#11919794)
          >why didn't they just cut the MB in half and support the Intel proc the same way they do the AMD one?

          Ah yes, the King Solomon solution!
          • Then allow me to propose the same sentiment in a different manner:

            Why didn't they make an AMD motherboard with an Intel expansion card instead of an Intel motherboard with an AMD expansion card? It seems it would be just as easy to put both of them on their own card and make it more modular.
            =Smidge=
    • nah, apples to apples would be powerpc, this is clearly oranges to oranges....

  • Whos gonna buy? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "I do wonder who is actually gonna buy this board in place of their usual favorite, since it's not like people are swapping their processors around every chance they get, unless they don't actually use the computer they've built."

    Says the businessman from /.
    • It does open the door to transitional upgrades though. Say you've got some old P4 in there, switching to AMD then doesn't require switching motherboards, RAM, et al.

      ECS also has a bit of history with transitional upgrade motherboards. Their K7S5A was a decent AMD motherboard that supported any AMD Athlon, Duron, or Athlon XP up to 2200+, and supported both traditional and DDR SDRAM (though DDR was only up to 266), though not both at the same time.

      That said, I owned a K7S5A until it fried while under warra

  • the point is... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by idlake ( 850372 ) on Saturday March 12, 2005 @10:17AM (#11919239)
    I do wonder who is actually gonna buy this board in place of their usual favorite

    I suspect this isn't aimed at DIY types. Instead, it lets manufacturers and stores offer a range of configurations in both AMD and Intel without having to create two separate PC lines and without having to increase their inventory.

    • Re:the point is... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by AndroidCat ( 229562 )
      No, it lets them claim that it's swappable.

      It'll come in the Intel configuration, and the extra AMD card will cost more. And then, six months later when you really do want to switch to AMD, you'll find that they don't make the AMD card any more and you're SOL.

      It's aimed at people who can't make up their mind and want expensive training wheels (that don't really work, but have a high feel good factor).

      • I vaguely recal asus pimping something like this in the past, a small slot where you could put a 56k modem or some other media perhiprial, but it always baffled me why it was there - you almost never actually heard of anyone carrying the card, and even if they did, why would you ever want it?

        The only theory I could come up with was an OEM customer wanted it and it was cheaper to leave it there for the retail version of the board than take it off.

  • Interesting stuff... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Lisandro ( 799651 ) on Saturday March 12, 2005 @10:18AM (#11919243)
    I don't know about the rest, but my experiences with ECS boards (K7S5A mainly, a hidden gem) have been very positive. Nice prices aswell; if they price this one right it could sell like hotcakes among OEM sellers.

    For the rest (end users who build their own systems), it's a fix to a problem that doesn't really exists.
    • >I don't know about the rest, but my experiences
      >with ECS boards (K7S5A mainly, a hidden gem) have
      >been very positive.

      Surely, this is some sort of so sarcastic joke that it's not obvious anymore it's a joke?

      The K7S5A is surely a prime contender for the worst mainboard to ever have hit this earth. It had severe design issues, couldn't run stable at the advertised speeds, didn't properly support multiple memory modules, had horrible on-board sound, and was generally, just crap. Oh, and did you hear
      • I heard about it, and funnily enough, it never gave me an issue. Not once - the only time it fucked up was once when i tried to flash the BIOS to enable FastWrites, which my nVidia card didn't like much (hanged the system regularly).

        As for the idiotic (agreed :)) taped heatsink thing, i agree. I fixed it myself once when i tried to overclock the thing, but the system is dead stable in stock velocities for me, even with the sink for asthetic purposes. My K7S5A has been running nonstop for 11 months now
        • See for example http://www.redhill.net.au/b-02.html

          I know several other people that claimed their ECS K7S5A was stable, until they tried running things like BurnMMX/BurnBX. Needless to say, they got rid of those boards quickly afterwards, as I got rid of mine.

          It was a good lesson in "why you should buy the most expensive instead of the cheapest mainboard you can get".

          • I actually did during the FW incident - another good test of stability was running a compile of a large program (say, X.Org) and see if it completed or not.

            Most of the problems with that motherboard were memory related, IIRC.
            • I've got this mobo in the family computer and it won't take the ram up to full speed. It's got pc2100 ram in there but I have to run it at pc1600 which of course means that the processor is running at less than maximum speed as well. I have tried multiple different sticks of ram in this board and it's a piece of shit. A friend of mine had one too and he has tons of problems getting his on-board audio to work. I eventually took pity on him and gave him an extra Soundblaster Live PCI512 (or somesuch) I had la
      • Actually, I don't think so for everyone.
        I agree many people had problems with the K7S5A, but many did not. I was a lucky one and personally built several low end Athlon and Duron systems for clients, friends and family with few problems. I was picking the board up for as low as $30 shipped. Sure, the onboard sound sucked, but my clients couldn't care less. They didn't want their employees listening to music anyhow.

        I can't remember for the life of me now, but I think there was a direct correlation to
      • A few years ago I built half a dozen computers based around the ECS K7S5A motherboard, and they all performed (and still are performing) flawlessly. In fact, it was my early success with the K7S5A that led me to try a few other ECS motherboards, mostly with disastrous results. I don't recommend ECS motherboards in general, but in the past I have suggested the K7S5A board to lots of people that were building an AMD system on a tight budget.

        The only problem I experienced with the K7S5A was the incredibly t

      • No joke... (Score:2, Interesting)

        by SaDan ( 81097 )
        I've had a K7S5A for a long time now (three years? started out with a Duron 750), and never had problems with this board. It's been my main system the entire time, and has had various forms of Linux, Windows 2000, and XP installed. Very compatible system with all of the operating systems I've tried so far (everything just WORKS), and I believe I paid about $60 for the board when it was new.

        It was upgraded to an XP1600, and finally a mobile Athlon XP2600 (45W version, Barton core).

        It is currently runnin
      • You, and all the replies below which claim "serious design flaws" with this system really have absolutely no idea what you are talking about..

        I went through several tens of these boards and they all ran stable (from several differetn batches over about a year period...

        i have seen ALL of these probs on this board... they always end up being either bad ram (not flaky mobo, just crappy generic ram) or an underpowered PSU... It usually is because people who tend to buy an ECS board tend to be cheapskates and
    • Elitegroup boards are the devil. I work with them everyday. They are horribly designed, horribly unstable, and horribly undocumented. They were notorious for the CPU clips breaking on Socket 478. I work as a service tech and about 25% of the ECS boards I get in are dead or dying.

      Worst. Motherboards. Ever.
    • The K7s5a is the board that doesnt die....
      I bought it years ago because a expensive epox board meet the fate of the screwdriver scratch and i NEEDED one, but didnt have any money.

      It still runs. It doesnt support usb2.0, it shows my cpu only as "unknown amd", but it runs for years without any problems (at some times up to an uptime of >50days). It has now a GB of ram, has onboard 100mbit +an pci lan card, a raid 5 hardware controller, radeon9500pro, watercooling... and it just doesnt die.
      Its like the vw

  • Wait a minute.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by ZoneGray ( 168419 ) on Saturday March 12, 2005 @10:18AM (#11919244) Homepage
    Here, wait while I change CPU's... okay, that's better.

    With the AMD, this would have been mod'ed -1, but with the Intel, it's only -0.9999999998.

  • Who cares? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Pan T. Hose ( 707794 )
    Great, so two irrelevant branches of an obsolete architecture are once again pin-compatible. But what about better architectures? What I would like to see is an architecture-independent motherboard so I wouldn't have to lock myself in the world of endless register spilling (do they have four general purpose registers already?) and 16-bit bootstrap process from the stone age every time I buy a half-decent motherboard. What I would like to see is a good implementation of MMIX with 256 general-purpose 64-bit r

    • Re:Who cares? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by MetaPhyzx ( 212830 )
      a real 64-bit platform, not a fake one like those from Intel and AMD. That is something I will pay some extra $$$ for


      Umm can't you get that from Apple?
      • Just too bad it's slower than the inferior 'fake' ones.
      • AMD64 is not any less real 64bits than the PowerPC... the PowerPC was originally a 32bits chip and got 64bits extensions a few years before AMD/Intel's x86 chips.

        How many pure 64bits CPUs are out there? All those I know are based on some older 8/16/32 bits, expanding and warping the instruction set and architecture along the way. AMD/Intel only carry more legacy cruft than many others along with the irregular and somewhat crufty x86 instruction set tradition... and all these bugs^H^H^H^H^H errata that had
    • Great, so two irrelevant branches of an obsolete architecture are once again pin-compatible. They aren't - in fact, it has two sets of chipsets to control both cpu's (Intel for Intels' and SiS for AMDs').

    • Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by andreyw ( 798182 ) on Saturday March 12, 2005 @10:45AM (#11919377) Homepage
      Apparently being a PhD doesn't imply being able to RTFA. Pin-compatble? Not. Read the damn article. Hell, screw the article - READ THE /. SUMMARY, at least.

      Obsolete architecture? No. Clearly not. Look up the meaning of the word 'obsolete.' Being a so-so architecture with a convoluted design (if you had to write a software opcode decoder for anything > 8086, you know what I am talking about) doesn't imply obsoleteness. Register spilling? What ISA, exactly, are you complaining about anyways - 8086? 80286? IA-32? IA-32 >= 80486? IA-32 >= Pentium? IA-32 >= Pentium Pro? x86-64?

      You conmplain about the boot process.... likely about the non-integral 8086 compatibility mode found in all consumer IA-32 and x86-64 processors. I hope that a smart cookie like you can figure out that the existence of such support is purely market driven? You _do_ realize that Intel manufactures _purely_ 32-bit IA-32 processors, for embedded, industrial and military purposes, that do not support the 8086 ISA?

      And another question. Are you complaining for the sake of complaining? Because I can tell you that from an average-joe, or even HLL programmer perspective, the ISA isn't particularly important, assuming you stick to good programming practices. (Yes, I am looking at you, morons who whine "SIGBUS" after running their broken code on a Sparc).

      You're a PhD at freakin' Stanford. You tell me. Does there exist a motherboard and a matching set of different CPUs with the same pinouts? Wait, this is obvious. Of course not. You realize that the pin differences aren't due to some PHB thinking that having 123123 pins is better than 4242424? If someone DID come up with such a compatibility layer... say... allowing a PowerPC (with whatever bus), to operate on say... the Athlon/AlphaEV6 EV6 bus... then the performance overhead would be heinous.

    • Re:Who cares? (Score:3, Informative)

      by WillerZ ( 814133 )
      By the way: Athlon-64 has 16 64-bit GPRs, not 4.

      There are a lot of alternatives out there, and your inability to find/use them is not a problem which AMD and Intel are overly concerned with. For instance, here are a few of your options:

      64-bit RISC:
      http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/pseries/ [ibm.com]
      http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/iseries/ [ibm.com]
      http://www.pegasosppc.com/tech_specs.php [pegasosppc.com]
      http://www.apple.com/powermac/ [apple.com]
      http://www.sun.com/servers/index.html [sun.com]
      http://www.hp.com/products1/servers/HP9000_family_ o [hp.com]
    • They did develop a new 64-bit architecture with 128 integer and 128 floating-point registers (IIRC). It's called Intel Itanium (based on EPIC), which flopped badly, even if it could run x86 code with emulation. I'm guessing MMIX will have the exact same problems, simply because it isn't x86.
    • Great, so two irrelevant branches of an obsolete architecture are once again pin-compatible

      Irrelevant and obsolete to you in your alternate reality. And they aren't pin compatible.

      If you want a better architecture, there are choices other than Intel and AMD CPUs. However, they are good enough for a great majority of the world. Most people's needs are well suited by the current Intel/AMD offerings; the R&D cost to satisfy a few whiny people would definitely not be worth it. There are other architect

  • Er... that's not one motherboard. (Score:5, Informative)

    by MetaPhyzx ( 212830 ) on Saturday March 12, 2005 @10:22AM (#11919271)
    That's a decieving blurb. I was pretty excited at first. Bad slashdot =)

    That's two motherboards, not a board and a processor daughtercard. Reminds me of Apple with the "DOS Compatibility Card". If pretty much EVERYTHING I need for AMD64 is on the "daughtercard" it's a motherboard in itself. Not to mention that the article doesn't say whether or not that card is a buy-in add-on, which it probably is.

    So, you'll shell out X for the Intel board, and X for the AMD sub/conversion/daughter-board.

    I can see how it's cool technology, but who's gonna adapt this? And how hard would it have been to intergrate and TRULY have one board?
    • That was my thought as well. If you're going to go to this much trouble to design a mainboard that swings both ways, and given that the market for "need to *switch* between AMD and Intel CPUs" is probably limited to game programmers... ...why not have it all on one board? Have both CPUs and their necessary chipsets present, and switch between them in the BIOS, so it would require nothing more onerous than a reboot and a brief trip into CMOS setup.

      Otherwise -- by about the 3rd time a person has to open up t
    • It should have been both on a card of their own. It shouldn't have a socket on the main board, the processor should be on the daughterboard. Slide out the Intel daughterboard and slide in the AMD board. Putting both CPU sockets on the mainboard seems to be too much. The Intel daughterboard would have to have a Northbridge on it.

  • I think they've made one crucial mistake in their implementation.

    Look at the pictures in the article and you'll notice something annoying about the position of the AMD daughterboard slot.

    It blocks the top PCI slot, turning it into useless space when there is an AMD CPU mounted on the board.

    I wonder why they didn't make the AMD daughterboard slot the uppermost slot on the board?

  • Cop Out? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by menace3society ( 768451 )
    If you put the second processor on a daughterboard, are they really on the same motherboard? By that logic a graphics board is on the same motherboard as the main processor, too, and that's all the more cool because they're completely different kinds of processors.

    Call me when they get the two chips sitting side by side and running an OS.
    • By that logic a graphics board is on the same motherboard as the main processor, too, that's all the more cool because they're completely different kinds of processors


      we already have on-board gpu's. the xbox has the gpu and cpu on the board. its been nothing special for a long time :s. the only intresting thing about this technology in TFA is that its a daughterboard to route all the mainboards cpu activity to it.
  • May be it can comes in handy, while testing software...
    • I see it as being more useful for testing the CPUs against each other. Being in (roughly) the same motherboard and in the same system would get rid of more variables and make the cpus the only thing you're testing. Too bad the two chips aren't cutting edge, though, where such tests are much more relevant..

  • When It's upgrade time... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Chris Kamel ( 813292 ) on Saturday March 12, 2005 @10:36AM (#11919334)
    I do wonder who is actually gonna buy this board in place of their usual favorite, since it's not like people are swapping their processors around every chance they get, unless they don't actually use the computer they've built.
    The problem is that by the time you'd want to upgrade your processor and want to have the choice between AMD and Intel, both will have changed their socket designs and u'd need a new mobo anyway.

    • by the time you'd want to upgrade your processor and want to have the choice between AMD and Intel, both will have changed their socket designs

      That's really not true at all.

      Intel changes the socket for every different family of it's processors (PII/PIII/P4/etc), but if you bought an early 400MHz PIII, it's not unthinkable that you might want to upgrade to a 1.2GHz PIII later on.

      AMD is better than Intel in this respect. They've been using Socket A for many years now, and continue to use it. Until you wa

  • So... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If i buy Intel, i get the daughter card in addition? Well personally I can only see the advantage of easy upgrades, but a less savvy buyer who buys intel will wonder: What is this thing, and why did i pay for it?
  • With the Intel setup, the processor north bridge and RAM are directly connected to the board. On the other hand, the AMD daughterboard is on a card. This means that the system has to go out to the card to communicate with the processor, RAM and north bridge.
    • RAM and chipset are built onto the daughterboard, so all the "essentials" are on the same board. Benchmarks look OK judging from the screenshots in the article, and of course the data rates of devices on the board itself are far lower than the core components of CPU/mem/nb, so I can't see latency being too big an issue.

  • Retarded. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Renraku ( 518261 ) on Saturday March 12, 2005 @11:00AM (#11919442) Homepage
    That's a great idea.

    Now instead of buying a higher quality but slightly more expensive board (like an nForce type or its Intel-compatable cousin, whatever that is) you can buy a cheap-ass ECS board with gimpy AMD support for the same price!

    This wouldn't even be good for reviews, like someone else posted about earlier. Think about what the AMD must now go through besides just an ordinary socket. Hell, even if you made the ordinary 6 inches tall it would probably be faster than this solution!
  • This could be useful. I work as a hardware tech, and it's a pain to find a motherboard to test CPUs on. If the daughterboard could be made to support other processors, and preferably have some sort of protection, so it wouldn't damage the rest of the system, it could save a ton of time and money.

  • Eh.. ECS?! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Xyl3ne ( 802919 )
    It's a very interesting design which seems to work well, but the main problem is, it's made by ECS. Unless they try to prove they are a reputable manufacturer or license the technology (do they need to do that?) to another company that's more reputable (such as ASUS) and have them manufacture them. Everytime I hear about ECS it's "God damnit, my ECS motherboard failed again!" or "Not again!! The damn capacitors on my ECS board exploded again!"

  • Am I the only one to find it quite amusing how he appearantly couldn't find the print-screen button?

  • What is the most stable motherboard to run the 64 bit AMD processor? Can someone suggest one please. Thank you!
  • Now they can sell AMD machines without selling AMD machines. IT directors who are locked into buying from Dell can buy these with cheap Celerons, then drop in AMD upgrade cards for people who do actual work. Then, when the PHBs notice their IT people have better PCs, they'll hear "Well, we could have bought AMD machines from the get-go for less money, but you said we had to buy from Dell".

    At which point there will either be a revalation that Dell sucks, or the IT guy gets fired. Or a PHB with just enoug
  • Would be to bring back the PCI X86 card for my mac so I can run Virtual PC emulation at a decent speed!
    • The "PC Compatibility Card" was actually a fairly complicated setup. It required some special hardware on the motherboard to link the PC sound output into the Mac speakers, and also output video from the PC hardware. On top of that, there was a special extension required in the MacOS to switch back and forth between Mac and Windows, meaning that the card is useless in PPC Linux or OS X. Also, it required special drivers in Windows, meaning other PC OSes are out the window as well.

      There was a company, I bel
  • To begin with, it's an ECS (which stands for Extremely Crappy Stuff, I believe, although the S may stand for something else).

    Who is this for exactly? People who don't know enough to build their own systems most likely don't care if it's AMD or Intel, just that it's inexpensive and it works well (that leaves out ECS), in which case AMD would be the obvious choice anyway...

    Like I said, I don't get it.

  • Huh? (Score:4, Funny)

    by tuxedobob ( 582913 ) * <tuxedobob@mac . c om> on Saturday March 12, 2005 @01:24PM (#11920237)
    I thought Intel and AMD were compatible? You need separate boards for them? Suddenly, the screams of "Macs use proprietary hardware" make less sense.
    • Suddenly, the screams of "Macs use proprietary hardware" make less sense.

      It's the copyrighted ROM that makes the Mac propritary, not socket compatibility, or anything like that.

      Other companies make PPC hardware, but you can't run OS X on them because it requires the "secret" code in the ROM to work.

      PCs would be propritary too, if Windows XP wouldn't run without a Phoenix BIOS, Intel processor, etc.

  • benchmarks (Score:3, Insightful)

    by XO ( 250276 ) <blade.eric@NospAM.gmail.com> on Saturday March 12, 2005 @02:17PM (#11920602) Homepage Journal
    sounds like a good deal for those who do benchmarks. wanna benchmark processors? do like we did with the Socket 7 days.. just take identical machines, and swap processors.
  • You think they got the idea from this bitchin' video card? [bbzzdd.com]

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