Still OT: Pentium / M$ drivel... (fairly long)

Once upon a midnight dreary, Tim Hotze had spoken clearly: Noper... out of the box the Celery processor does *not* support SMP. Intel *deliberately* disabled it in the design of the processor... there's a particular pin on the Celery that says: "Nope. Sorry. Can only have one of me." Now, if you do a websearch for prolly "+dual +celeron +modification +SMP" on altavista then you should come up with a page (on a Japanese server) that a person found out which traces to cut, and where to solder wires to re-make the SMP connections to run duals... but you're (obviously) going to void the warranty on the CPU's, etc., etc., etc. I have to disagree with this, Allison, one of my points being: The value / speed / whatever of a Microprocessor means little versus the *marketing* of a processor / computer. The lowly Motorola 6809 at 2 Mhz outperforms a 10Mhz 80286... by far. It also *smokes* the 6502. And other than Xenix 286 (super-expensive), OS-9 is the most powerful OS available for these processors, and at a reasonable cost (When I bought my copy - $139.)... But how many Tandy CoCo's (1, 2, or 3) were sold in relation to Commie 64's, Atari 800's, and XT/AT's??? (Never mind that the CoCo had the longest-running continuous production for an 8-bit home machine)... The CoCo came in last in this particular list. Marketing - not capability. MIPS didn't have a chance to "take over" in the main desktop market... just be a niche market deal - like the Sparc's, Alpha, etc. The N64 does better 3D - because it's designed for *solely* that. Can it run a spreadsheet? Can it run a WP? Hell, even a terminal proggie? The MIPS means little in this - the graphics subsystem chipsets are where you get your 3D speed. You're comparing apples to oranges there. A Maserati is designed to go a *lot* faster than my 4-wheel-drive - but I can run over a lot of Maserati's with my truck. (and with a top cruising speed of 115mph, it's no slouch... ;^> ) The reason MIPS are becoming more common is because of *marketing*, not technical savvy. My Palm III beats the tar out of any WinBlows CE machine - Let's compare specs: Palm III WinBlows CE 16-Mhz 68000(dragonball) 50 / 75-Mhz MIPS (that I've seen, anyway...) 800K OS size 8 Meg OS Size (except one that made it in 4 Meg) 2Meg RAM 4 Meg RAM 1.95Meg Usable RAM 1.5Meg Usable RAM 20-80K avg. pgm. size 120-300+K avg. pgm. size ~90 hours cont. use on 2 AAA Batteries Giggle. Smirk. Gasp. Battery Life?!?!?!?!? Now, the Palm III is outselling any *individual* WinCE platform - but by sheer numbers of companies giving (IMNSHO) way too much money to Billy-bob Gates, the Palm is not the market leader. Flooding the market certainly has it's advantages. Now, to bring this (slightly) on-topic - all those assembly language skills you learned *way back* on one of those nice, *fast* classic machines, like an Atari ST, or early Macintosh, or Amiga (damn... *still* waiting for my 1200's) - fit very nicely to the Palm realm. What can you do on a WinBlows machine? Not much - Billy-boy doesn't release all the OS / API information (at least freely) so you can't program in Assy. or another "non-M$-approved" programming language. --- Well, not easily. Roger "Merch" Merchberger