Brandon wrote:

Hello you brilliant minds, I am in need of some (probably basic) information

concerning

CentOS and the new dual core 64 bit systems. I realize

that

Linux was inherently built for multiple processor systems,

as

well as 64 bit systems. My first question is AMD doing anything special with doing all of the above on one chip that I need to know about before installing CentOS on my newest system?

Both AMD and Intel do their best to "hide" any hardware changes that are not compatible with legacy GTL+ through various support chips, and those interface appear "standard" in the APIC registers.

In the case of AMD, they virtualized the GTL+ "bus" back with the adoption of the Alpha EV6 architecture/interconnect "switch" with the original Athlon. They have gone to a true, "partial mesh" in the Athlon64/Opteron, but it all still appears as a GTL+ "bus" from the standpoint of Linux (although the Linux kernel does have some modifications for better efficiency of the architecture).

The AMD dual-cores are actually interconnect almost the _exact_same_ as if they were two seprate sockets, from an electrical/logic standpoint. There are only a few performance considerations (both pro and con) of the dual-core v. two sockets.

In the case of Intel, still using the GTL+ "bus," so they have had to add a _lot_ of bridging in the new dual-cores. There's a lot of commentary on this, because Intel is releasing a better dual-core this year (mid-2006). But the underlying architecture is radically different for Intel separate cores v. dual or multicore. Intel is close to introducing multiple front-side busses for its server chips with a switching interconnect -- much like old Alpha EV6 (which 32-bit Athlon used).

Also, my motherboard being a a8n32-sli has SATA II

Which is largely a marketing term: http://thebs413.blogspot.com/serial_storage_is_future.html

SATA-IO is what you want, otherwise, SATA-II without SATA-IO is kinda like USB 2.0 without EHCI. Most of the benchmarks have no clue, because the drives can't break 150MBps yet -- so they can only give artificial numbers of what the chip is actually capable of when the signal has to traverse cabling only designed for 1.5GHz. ;->

and RAID

FRAID (Fake RAID). Disable it.

capabilities. Is there anything special about the SATA II that I need to set up to use the full capabilities of this hardware and CentOS. Any information would be better than what I have at the moment.

I haven't seen anything on SATA-IO developments so, again, SATA-II is rather a lot of marketing baloney at this point. The SATA-II chip is allegedly capable of 3GHz. The SATA-II drive is allegedly capable of 3GHz. But I've seen nothing to the 3GHz SATA-IO standard as specified by the ATA committees.