is it possible to make a low end multi socket motherboard?

[Judess69er]

just for the sake of if it can be done i was wondering if it was even possible to make a motherboard that can take 2 or even 4 old generation CPU's in it

iv been noticing recently the prices of athlon ii chips are quite low like 5 bucks a piece low and i was thinking about this one day since i hear a lot of the tech community saying "dual socket motherboards aren't really necessary these days because there's not really any game on the market that can bottleneck a high end CPU like a threadripper, i9, i7, ryzen 5 or 7 chip"

but what about the earlier generation chips sempron, athlon, phenom, celeron, pentium, i3, i5 ya know those kinda chips that just cant keep up these days

there's a bunch of people i see asking about the same question and logically if each processor is identical in architecture to the one next to it there shouldn't be compatibility issues

if you were running 4 of the same athlon ii x2 together it could equal out to a budget 8 core cpu for under 50 bucks, true they may not be loaded with the instruction sets the newer CPU's have but it would at least give them horde power, same general logic as torrenting or launching a DDoS attack with zombie computers, so why couldn't we get this kind of thing to work for older sockets?

thinking about it a little more if they were running in a horde format it wouldn't actually matter if the chips were identical because each processor could be in charge of its own set of processes like one could be dedicated to your computers OS and the other 3 could be dedicated to things like video decoding, graphics rendering and miscellaneous processes

ironically this kind of setup is actually more interesting the more i think about it because cpu's could be designed in sets that excel in processing specific things more effectively, we've done the same thing with RAM and GPU's whats so crazy about doing it for CPU's?

 

[PP Mguire]

Setups like that require a communication link between the two processors, that of which is non-existent in consumer CPUs.

 

[Judess69er]

yea but what if the processors don't actually have to communicate with each other but instead all of the pre-processing is done on a higher level and then piped to each processor depending on the socket its in, socket #0 would be the main socket that everything could be routed to if no other socket bays were in use, so the processors themselves wouldn't be interacting with each other they would just be supplementing the first CPU with a 2nd brain

 

[U.F.O.]

You still need a bus to communicate even without northbridge and whatever else. It's not the same as smaller pcb I don't think.

 

[Judess69er]

You still need a bus to communicate even without northbridge and whatever else. It's not the same as smaller pcb I don't think.

i was thinking something more like a flow regulator on the motherboard itself that works as a switch to offload a portion of the workload going to the main cpu to one of the supplementary CPU's

the main socket CPU would be dedicated to OS and anything relating to the operating system itself so in theory you could have your main cpu controlling your OS and a secondary cpu dedicated entirely to the operation of a game, since each cpu would be independent of each other they wouldn't be affected by seperate processes stalling if your OS started not responding and you were playing a game the secondary cpu would remain unaffected by the stalling in the os

in theory. lol its just a random idea that's been bouncing around in the back of my head for a while

 

[U.F.O.]

Sounds cool, but what I'm saying is the hardware needs an electrical path for this data and software instructions for these rules. Every idea is a good idea in theory. It would be infinitely faster and cheaper to get a machine that is made from the factory to handle games, mining, whatever intense computing is your bag. Why reinvent the wheel?

 

[Judess69er]

Sounds cool, but what I'm saying is the hardware needs an electrical path for this data and software instructions for these rules. Every idea is a good idea in theory. It would be infinitely faster and cheaper to get a machine that is made from the factory to handle games, mining, whatever intense computing is your bag. Why reinvent the wheel?

idk i just figured it would be interesting to be able to use older processors that are just floating around and aren't very powerful alone but as a horde of CPU's that might equal the power of a newer generation CPU kind of a way to reuse these older chips that still work and are just floating around and cant be used for gaming at the moment, to be honest just an idea for reducing computer waste lol

 

[U.F.O.]

Yea I once toyed with the idea of taking some 4 core cell phones I wasn't using and mining whatever simple algorithm can profit on them, all on my home wifi and with power adapters. It was lame they got super hot and I didn't make any bread! But I learned how resilient phones are, I left them running hot for a long time and everything still works, camera all that.

 

[PP Mguire]

i was thinking something more like a flow regulator on the motherboard itself that works as a switch to offload a portion of the workload going to the main cpu to one of the supplementary CPU's

the main socket CPU would be dedicated to OS and anything relating to the operating system itself so in theory you could have your main cpu controlling your OS and a secondary cpu dedicated entirely to the operation of a game, since each cpu would be independent of each other they wouldn't be affected by seperate processes stalling if your OS started not responding and you were playing a game the secondary cpu would remain unaffected by the stalling in the os

in theory. lol its just a random idea that's been bouncing around in the back of my head for a while

Pretty much everything you're describing is handled by QPI and scheduling in the OS. Thing is, your setup would require separate I/O for everything without that QPI link.

So for instance these older CPUs you're talking about on the AMD side the PCI-E lanes and all I/O are handled by the northbridge. So each CPU would need it's own set of memory and northbridge, as well as their own drives, cards etc. Linking the two together by something 3rd party would introduce a ton of latency and no software is setup to take advantage of something like this.

This is why QPI exists in Xeons. It's a high speed dedicated link for resource sharing so both processors have instant access to all information being handled and resources downstream like storage drives and expansion cards, as well as shared memory usage. Think about the amount of latency that would be introduced if CPU 2 needed to access OS data from RAM in the CPU 1 data stream then transmit that back to a GPU on the CPU 1 stream.

 

[U.F.O.]

Yea man don't feel bad, I've cleaned out shutting down pawn shops that had pallets of ram but ddr2 and below, pallets of chips but dual and single core. It looks cool seeing a lot of them together. But one worthless rock next to a hundred won't do anything, tied together or in any configuration.