Athlon XP 1

[BChumie]

Hello,

I posted this message before and it got deleted for some reason. Basically I am upgrading from and athlon to and athlon XP. My motherboard and everything I have are compatable so that is not an issue. The problem I am having is - do I need to reinstall windows XP? I have posted this on the windowsXP forum and I just need as much feedback as possible inorder to make a decision. Basically I want to save my self hours of work if I do not have to reinstall. I know the athlon XP has newer chip instructions but couldn't windows accomidate for this by just installing new drivers for the processor only? Again just so we are clear, I am only changing the processor. The mother board I have (Epox 8k7a rev 1.1) supports that processor and all of my hardware should support it <<knock on wood>>

Thanks for any response,
Brad

Also if this is an imappropriate post for this forum please let me know. I don't understand why my original one got deleted because this does have to do with a hardware upgrade.

 

[cdogg]

Thanks for clearing that up! I'm learning as I go...

~cdogg

&quot;The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.&quot;
- Albert Einstein

 

[RiverGuy]

I do think there is a bypass though. I was reading about Linux distros or kernals or something that are optimized for SSE. I'll try to find some more links.

Kind of like sound cards. If you are running a movie or a game or even a cd that is say, 4.1 encoded, if your software program isn't, it will come out in stereo sound.

 

[DBSSP]

Digital electronics are a little tricky to explain. Since the SSE instruction set isn't really software (refer to CDogg's post with links)all the data must pass through the extra hardware (registers, FP's, etc). At the minimum this will assign the data certain addresses for access and processing. Remember, the extra hardware can't process special data if the data doesn't flow through to begin with. This all ties into special hardware decoders, calculations, logic paths, etc. These are really beyond the scope of this post, but to keep a long story short the SSE would be used for processing power at the very least. Jay
&quot;If the words up and down were reversed, would you trip and fall or trip and fly?&quot;