[rescue] sparc10 cpu - what to do.

[john]

FWIW, in 1990-91 we sold a photo-realistic rendering application, no, 
not the one for use  at slaughterhouses.  Maybe some of the users were 
confused.  in any case one used these to place an architectural surface 
file in a realistic background and using a whole lot of sweat and time, 
produce an image which could be printed with a TI dye transfer printer 
and impress the daylights out of an architect's client.  A guy with a 
good feel for how the thing worked and a LOT of time could turn out 
something that looked almost real. And for the time, that was the standard.

I cannot remember the name of the thing, but what was interesting was 
that a Sparc2 could process the image in about 10% of the time it took 
on a 486.  I think the math co-processor was resident in the 486 chip by 
then, but if it wasn't, our test machine had one.

the difference was so astonishing to us that we invested in a lot of 
dialogue with the developer who was also astonished.  we supposed bad 
compiler fit with Intel, but developer who felt his future lay with 
intel, not sun, market was really focused on making it work with intel.  
And at the time, this was the best they could do.

but back to the cpu issue. I have a single SM51. Since these look 
relatively inexpensive, my thought was to add another one. I'm assuming 
I need the same part number as it looks like Sun made a number of 
different SM51's.  I'm also running two 2Gig drives in this case, one of 
which is an early one and runs hot.  I'm going to see if i can find 
something more modern and maybe more commodious. I understand that I'll 
wind up with a bunch of 2 gig partitions, but I don't really need the 
room, just more than the 2 gigs on a single drive.

If I add this second CPU, am I likely to need to recompile kernel? Or 
only if I picked badly when I set it up the first time?

Have I written anything stupid here, and if so, what would you do?

And thanks for all of the thoughts shared todate.  Some very good stuff 
here.

I suppose I'm a bit out of it here.  I left the Suniverse in 1993 with 
my IPX and the 10 and never progressed.  although I did get pretty good 
exercise getting GCC and Ghostscript into the 10.

thanks, John