Re: Athlon SMP blues - kernels 2.4.[9 13 15-pre4]

["Dan Maas" <dmaas@dcine.com>]

> I confirm that XP chips aren't supported in smp configs
> by AMD.  I can't of the top of my head give URLs to confirm

This is just your typical profit-maximizing hardware vendor price
discrimination scheme. i.e. make one product, but sell at two different
price levels. Sprinkle on some FUD about how the cheaper part isn't suitable
for "professional" use, and there you go... Pretty much all tech companies
use some variant of this trick, because it is almost always cheaper to
mass-produce one product and sell a crippled version also, than to
mass-produce two products with truly different costs.

But since we are all l33t hackers we see right through this and brazenly
stick unapproved Athlons in SMP systems. (At least until AMD sees this as
enough of a threat to actually disable SMP functions via technical means =)

Regards,
Dan