Intro
Late last year, a YouTuber released a video titled "The Only Famous Motherboard." The video focused on the BP6 motherboard, a popular model from the late 1990s. Notably, the BP6 was the only consumer motherboard at that time capable of supporting two Celeron processors. While dual CPUs were primarily found in high-end workstations, such as those using Dual Pentium Pros and Dual Pentium III processors in the mid-to-late 90s, the idea of using two CPUs in consumer products was quite fascinating.
Windows 98 and NT4 did not support dual-CPU configurations, but Windows 2000 did. Linux already had SMP support way before Windows 98 and NT4 did.
The way I understand it is that with 1 core on the CPU, the second half carries the load, resulting in less time waiting and more time making money. Sadly, not enough support for this type of configuration from the Developers.
By the end of his video, He ends it with the planned topics he kinda wanted to talk about, and it never did, but it made me wonder
Why wasn't there a dual socket configuration by the early 2000s, right after the BP6!!!
A Mini History and Random Facts
We have to go way back, really, to the 1960s.
The Control Data (CDC) 6500 was a powerful, dual-CPU supercomputer from the 1960s, part of the CDC 6000 series designed by Seymour Cray and James Thornton. If u wanna know more click here from this stack Exchange question on what was the first multi-core-CPU Soo yeah alot of good stuff
RISC is designed for speed to perform a job effectively faster
Parallel processing involves running two tasks simultaneously on a chip.
While CISC instruction can perform multiple low-level tasks
By mid-1986-1990, it was all about Speed, while that was the case for most home consumer computers in the market. Multilevel processors were already available, but they were primarily used for the most advanced scientific applications from the US Government for NASA.
Another technology concept is called a transputer.
IBM Power 4 was the first or so CPU that had a dual-core on a chip released in 2000, before anyone did, but this was only for the server market, you know, the scientific stuff lol I saw a lot of people mention this from forums lol
Ok, after that mumbo jumbo stuff, again, why did multi-level CPU never release in the home computer in the early 2000s?
Penitum 4 HT
From what I learn about this Chip, it was actually released sometime around 2001? I am not sure about how the performance went, but according to this forum from 2003, Windows XP Home didn't support Hyper-Threading, only for those who purchased XP Pro. Plus, you have to check your BIOS.
Intel is preparing to start providing hyperthreading in its mainstream processors, not just its server-oriented products. At a very simplistic level, hyperthreading treats one processor as two, harnessing unused clock cycles to process two separate streams of instructions. The performance gain can be anywhere from 15 to 30 percent, depending on the workload and instruction mix. It requires an operating system and application software that support multiple processors.
As you've no doubt guessed by now, Windows XP Home doesn't support multiple processors. Win XP Pro does, and so does Windows 2000. Microsoft has no plans to add multiprocessor support to Home, having figured that home users would never need this feature, even though Intel had warned that it was coming. Or else those who wanted the added capability could pay for a copy of Pro. Intel, meanwhile, is trying to cement and extend its performance lead by combining ever-faster CPUs with hyperthreading to handle multimedia processing and other high-end consumer tasks.
At the end of the forum page, one user said HyperThreading is not SMP. It allows two separate programs to take advantage of different parts of the CPU. For example, one process can use the FPU and the other the ALU. Games typically only make use of one piece of the core.
Another website article describing P4 Hyper threading, and I now understand that later Windows XP versions did support this feature by mid-2003 or late 2003. And when you turn HT on, it's going to make applications and multitasking programs run smoothly
Meaning, after the BP6 was released, it took 3 years for Microsoft and Intel to figure out how these things were going to work. Meaning HT was already cooked inside Pentium 4 by 2004-2005. Plus, Newer games could take advantage of these later revisions of the Pentium 4 that had HT.
Intel Odd history on Speed and heating issues on CPU
CPUs dating back to the 386 were getting smaller and smaller and were all about speed from 15MHz up to 200MHz by 1996. However, when the Pentium was released, they actually were being sold to have a Fan or a fanless CPU cooler on it, meaning they were pretty much getting hotter. Later on, through the late 1990s, every PC with an Intel or any CPU had to find a way to cool its CPU. Meaning they were getting hotter and hotter.
However, on the Software side. Developers still coded for only 1 CPU, not dual CPU.
This trend continued throughout the Pentium 4 era, during which those chips generated a significant amount of heat. They became well-known among overclocking enthusiasts, but overall, they performed poorly compared to the AMD Athlon 64 CPUs of that time, particularly the Athlon 64 FX and X2 (dual-core) models. The NetBurst architecture featured long pipelines that attempted to compensate for high clock speeds, but this design resulted in excessive heat generation. AMD later made a similar mistake nearly ten years later with its "AMD FX" product line (Bulldozer and Piledriver), suffering from many of the same issues.
Intel Thought The Pentium 4 could go fast past 10GHz, but due to heat and insufficient cooling, it could only go past 4GHz.
With The Heat and the odd release Intel Itanium"IA-64, it was a bad time for Intel until the arrival of the Core 2 series "Core 2 duo and Core 2 Quad.
Wait What about AMD Athlon?
From what I researched, they did announce it. However, AMD just canceled it for their desktop line and only released it for the server line of CPU in the year 2001. They didn't even need to have it until they released their dual core in 2005. Here is something interesting more on about IF HT was Needed on AMD athlon on a forum post from 2005.
Initial SMP cancellation (2000): AMD had initially planned to release an Athlon SMP chip, but it was canceled due to the company's internal challenges. This left a gap in the dual-processor workstation and server market.
Athlon MP for servers (2001): Less than a year later, AMD introduced the Athlon MP and the 760MP chipset, bringing SMP capability to the server market. This chip used a different socket (Socket 462) than the desktop Athlon and required a specialized motherboard.
Workarounds for enthusiast : Some tech enthusiasts found ways to run two standard Athlon CPUs on an Athlon MP motherboard by making physical modifications to the chips. This allowed them to build a dual-CPU system on a budget.
Dual-core CPUs for the mainstream (2005): In 2005, AMD launched the Athlon 64 X2, its first mainstream dual-core CPU. By integrating two processing cores onto a single chip, AMD eliminated the need for complex, dual-socket motherboards for consumer PCs.
Like I said before, even if SMP was there the Games didn't support it before it, before mid 2003 "Idk maybe it wasn't until games could take dual cores around 2005-2006?" didn't not even support such features as Unreal Tournament 3, Despite the reviews on Athlon XP 3000+ and the people sugguesting that they may not buy it "Accoriding to reivews and Techpower up" Many games will refuse to start on this processor due to the lack of the SSE2/SSE3/SSE4 instruction set. But what's more important is that if you scroll below, something interesting is being said.
UT2003 does not support multithreading but that doesnt preclude seeing a minimal performance boost.The OS can still allocate background threads to the second logical processor. An application does not have to be specifically multithreaded to see a gain from SMP/Hyperthreading, the benefits are likely to be extremely minimal without it but it's certainly possible to see some benefit.
Post SMP
Between 2006 and 2008, Intel dual and quad core and AMD dual-core and quad-core markets.
Remember AMD Tricore CPU lol I had one and used it around 2014-2016 lmao.. It was a Cool CPU that only had 3 cores lol...
By 2008 Intel released the Bloomfield Architecture Da Core i7 920 , the very first 4-core 8 threaded chip that took AMD win, and the rest went to history and kept winning for 8 straight more years.
AMD CPU Market Struggle 2009-2016
I only remember that the FX lines were pretty much budget-friendly, but it was never able to catch the magic that Intel had with their First I7 from 2008.
Not until 2017, When The first 8-Core 16 Threaded CPU was released for the Home Consumer Computer market by AMD Zen Architecture.
Plese Note that Intel owns Hyper-Threaded Trademark so AMD created SMT "Simultaneous Multi-Threading"
There was a popularity of cheap dual Xeon setups where YouTubers from the tech community made cool setups. Even Myself who had strong urg to get into the whole Cheap Xeon setup during the whole Zen 1 Era.
TLDR Why Dual CPU Motherboard never Worked
1. Software developers had a hard time coding on 2 Chips on a motherboard. It's the reason why Coding games on an Atari Jaguar was really hard since it had 2 32-bit chips.
2. It took 3 Years 2000-2003 for Windows to implement SMP, but no one took it because it was complicated until Dual Cores were a thing in 2005-2006
3. Checkout Linus tech tips video and this one too lol
More infomation on why it took this long "from reddit"
What happend to ABIT?
The BP6 motherboard has some exploding capacitors, lol, I think because they chose cheap ones soo yeah becareful and replace them asap. The company closed down in 2007 or so, and the boss got big trouble and so he ran away with a lot of money, hiding somewhere off-grid lol 18 years later he's still on the run lol
So yeah, having two CPUs on a motherboard is really cool, but nowadays you can get an AMD EPYC setup and call it a day lol
Also, 32-bit applications were converging to 64-bit since both Intel and AMD released their first 64-bit CPU in 2003 or 2004. But it took a very, very long time for 32-bit applications to move to 64-bit. Hence, the reason why most vendors and Linux people have been trying to tell it for years to drop 32-bit and just upgrade to a newer computer lol due to security issues and lack of features compared to 64-bit. But hey nobody wanna throw there old computer away lol
PS. I really hope you enjoy reading this and learn something from it lol because i learn alot about it myself lol xoxoxo