> I think there was, once upon a time, a motherboard that could swap between x86 and Alpha processors with only minor reconfiguration (like, changing a jumper minor).
Deep into rumors that have been circulating in my brain for two decades now... But supposedly Slot A for the (original) K7 Athlon was very similar to the Alpha CPU bus (wikipedia says "The Athlon utilizes the Alpha 21264's EV6 bus architecture with double data rate (DDR) technology.[citation needed]"). The K7 team had some people who had worked on the Alpha at DEC, so there were lots of comparisons drawn.
Re:More on x86 – The Chip Letter
by whaleofatw2022 on Thursday April 25, 2024 @01:36PM
(#40160611)
Iirc there was at least a couple samsung alpha boards that used AMDs 750/760. UP1100 and UP1500
>> If you need to replace the motherboard, what's the point of reusing the existing socket?
Zero hardware changes for the board maker. I'm not sure it would be possible to reflash from x86 BIOS to RISC-V bios and reboot. That would be cool though. Or maybe they have a jumper to select which is expected (to switch between 2 BIOS images) and everything else is identical.
If you need to replace the motherboard, what's the point of reusing the existing socket? That said, I think I've seen this done, although the details are eluding me and web searches aren't helping; I think there was, once upon a time, a motherboard that could swap between x86 and Alpha processors with only minor reconfiguration (like, changing a jumper minor).