Ken Seefried said:

>AFAIK...the Sequents were closely coupled SMP on a given board (and always 
>had the same CPU speeds on a given board), but between boards it was a 
>loosely coupled MP affair.  Thus it was easier to have boards of different 
>speeds, as stepping issues, etc., didn't come into play. 

I believe that is correct.

>Anyone with really good memory remember if the Balances had different CPU 
>speeds? 

The Balance machines, I believe. could only have 1 cpu speed. Two boxes that
I maintained were Balance machines that were upgraded to Symmetry. They had
16 386/16 and 4 386/20 processors each.

One of these boxes had 350 users logged in on average during the day as well
as running multiple Progress databases and a news server. Interactive response
was amazing.

And then there was a Symmetry S2000 box that had 4 486/50 processors in a much
smaller case (but it still had blinkin' lights :-) that was evem more powerful
than the Symmetry S81 boxes. Of course, for $500k it should be.

Sequent had NUMA, clustering, and good mutex libraries long before other
UNIX vendors even thought of it.

-- 
Rick Kelly  rmk@rmkhome.com  www.rmkhome.com