Ben said:
Well that was very helpful in that I now know that support is not enabled in
my os and/or bios. Now how in the holy heck do i fix that?!
Here's a pic of the message I got from the AMD power Monitor when I tried to
start it.
http://i240.photobucket.com/albums/ff263/Guidottib/AMDPowerMonitor.jpg
Cool
So what is your motherboard (make and model) ?
Or alternately, if Dell/HP/Acer/Gateway, what is the make and model number
of the computer ?
A retail motherboard is going to be easiest to work with,
because I can download the manual. There are plenty of
motherboards that have jack-squat for documentation, and
if it's one of those, you're going to have to figure it
out.
Looking in an A8N-SLI motherboard manual here, one thing
I see is "ACPI APIC support". When it comes to interrupts,
there are two ways to handle them. PIC is programmable
interrupt controller. APIC is Advanced PIC. One of the
advancements, is interrupt steering, so interrupts can be
steered to either CPU on a multi-socket motherboard.
Even in a dual core or quad core processor, there is going to
be a need to do something similar. Steer interrupts, as
determined by what the OS wants to do with them. There
is a picture here, of a system where the I/O APIC (perhaps
part of the chipset) and the local APIC (part of the CPU),
work together to steer an interrupt to the right core.
http://flickr.com/photos/bike/189575110/
ACPI is defined here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acpi
The BIOS passes "tables" of information to the OS. If ACPI
is enabled in the BIOS, then those tables can be passed. Details
about all sorts of interfaces (even ones that control overclocking),
can be passed in those tables. The OS sometimes has drivers
installed, for various ACPI items it finds.
Since your Device Manager "Computer" entry says "ACPI", we know that
ACPI is working. We don't know at the moment, whether the ACPI
table that describes APIC is working. But if you checked the
numbering of the IRQs, you might get a hint. (I think if APIC
is anabled, IRQs go higher than the older 0-15 numbers. My
current computer goes from 0-23 with APIC enabled.)
Another thing I might look for, is MPS. But that isn't present
in the A8N-SLI manual, so I presume it is covered by something
else.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MultiProcessor_Specification
The Wikipedia article gives this link. And MPS turns out to be
none other than APIC and interrupt steering. The picture on
that Flickr link above, is actually extracted from page 17 here.
http://download.intel.com/design/pentium/datashts/24201606.pdf
So, if you tell me the motherboard, and there is a manual
for it, I can have a look and see if there is something
else to flip in terms of bits.
PDF page 159 (Section 5.7) here, has a description of setting up
Cool N' Quiet for AMD. Now it mentions a setting for "ACPI 2.0"
support and setting it to enabled. (And yet, the BIOS section
of the manual, doesn't show it.) So that might be another one
to check. I think ACPI is now up to version 3, but I don't think
that matters
ftp://ftp.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/socket939/A8N-SLI%20Deluxe/e1889_a8n_sli_deluxe.zip
Paul
