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AssigneeIntel Corporation
InventorsAdalberto Golbert, Douglas M. Carean, Roshan J. Fernando, Amar A. Ghori, Yoav Hochberg, Robert F. Krick, Milind Mittal, Anurag Sah
Estimating the term…
A method and apparatus for upgrading a uniprocessor system to a multiprocessing system simply by the insertion of a second microprocessor integrated circuit. The computer system is provided with an upgrade socket for receiving the second processing unit, as well as a private communications bus between the upgrade socket and the existing processor for handling interprocessor communications, bus arbitration and cache coherency, etc. The addition of the second processor is transparent to the system which maintains its memory management unit and caching system and other arrangements as though it were still a uniprocessing system. Therefore, an inexpensive method and apparatus are provided for greatly enhancing the speed of a uniprocessing system to that of a multiprocessing system without the cost traditionally associated with multiprocessing systems.
In a computer system having a first central processing unit (CPU), a memory bus coupled to said first CPU, and an external memory coupled to said memory bus, an apparatus for upgrading said computer system to operate as a dual-processor computer system comprising:
In a computer system having a first central processing unit (CPU), a memory bus coupled to said first CPU, an external memory coupled to said memory bus, an upgrade socket for receiving an integrated circuit package and a private communications bus coupling said first CPU to said upgrade socket, an upgrade CPU for utilizing said computer system as a dual-processor computer system, said upgrade CPU comprising:
In a computer system having a first central processing unit (CPU), a memory bus coupled to said first CPU, and an external memory coupled to said memory bus, a method of utilizing said computer system as a multiprocessing computer system comprising the steps of:
A computer system suitable for receiving an upgrade microprocessor and operating as a multiprocessing computer system with said upgrade microprocessor, said computer system having a first central processing unit (CPU), a memory bus communicating with said first CPU, and an external memory communicating with said memory bus, said computer system comprising:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.