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However, according to this, the Duron does officially support SMP.

There is an interview with an AMD PR bloke on CpuReview :-

1. Will the Duron support SMP?

Yes.

[This is good news. If only someone would make a cheap SMP board with DDR SDRAM support...]

The Register is running a story that AMD have unveiled the Thunderbird.

CPU Review has a review of the Thunderbird here, and Sharky Extreme review it here.

I have an AMD Athlon 700, 192 MB PC100 RAM, and 13 GB Ultra ATA 7200 RPM drive. These results are from my workstation system running RedHat 6.1.

Apache 1.3.9:
less than 30 seconds (25-30 sec. on three different runs) to compile Apache 1.3.9 from source with DSO support the only configuration option.

Tomcat 3.0
42-47 seconds to build Tomcat 3.0 from source (three different runs for comparison). Compiler used was javac shipped with Blackdown 1.2.2rc3 JDK.

2.2.13 kernel
Just under 2min 30 sec. to compile with a pretty standard config for my system (no sound, no SCSI suport) on two runs.

Here are some enlightening links on AMD Athlon performance and benchmarks:

• ars-technica.com Linux compile benchmarks
• sysopt.com Athlon 700 review (excellent)
• CPUReview.com review of Athlon 600 running RedHat 6.0
• compiler optimization benchmarks with Athlon 600

Note: none of the benchmarks I gave above used any custom compiler optimization settings.

...see CPU Review. This guy actually uses the distro and reviews the differences in a comprehensive manner. Just my 2 centavos.

This will get Linux into many more hands; you can't go to a small PC store without tripping over those cheap integrated PCChips motherboards.

I personally use a PCChips m750i dual processor motherboard with two Celeron 300A's running at 450 - makes a kick-ass Linux box (currently running Mandrake 6.1) - although I am going to put a different video card in it.

Normally a lot of small shops sell PC's without an OS, and in small print have "+100 for Windows 98" - now they can say "Comes pre-loaded with Corel Linux + WordPerfect (add Windows 98 for $100)"

I expect Linux to keep growing; don't forget about the Mexican governaments project for Linux labs in all Mexican schools - just think of all those millions of new Linux users every year!

This will get Linux into many more hands; you can't go to a small PC store without tripping over those cheap integrated PCChips motherboards.

I personally use a PCChips m750i dual processor motherboard with two Celeron 300A's running at 450 - makes a kick-ass Linux box (currently running Mandrake 6.1) - although I am going to put a different video card in it.

Normally a lot of small shops sell PC's without an OS, and in small print have "+100 for Windows 98" - now they can say "Comes pre-loaded with Corel Linux + WordPerfect (add Windows 98 for $100)"

I expect Linux to keep growing; don't forget about the Mexican governaments project for Linux labs in all Mexican schools - just think of all those millions of new Linux users every year!

I don't know about the rest of you, but I am VERY happy that AMD is giving Intel a run for our money.

Personally, I was getting REALLY tired of the "new" and exciting "innovative" processors a whole 33Mhz / 50Mhz faster than last quarters every quarter.

Since the Athlon has been out, P3 prices have been plummeting; I've been keeping track
of the fall in prices; there is NO WAY prices would have fallen so low without the Athlon goosing Intel!

I am very much looking forward to testing some Coppermine's, as soon as I can get my hands on them.

Good for Debian! I will certainly check it out; however unless they have significantly improved the installation procedure since I reviewed Debian for CPUReview newbies are likely to have problems installing it. Don't get me wrong, I liked dpkg; but the installation would have been very confusing to a prospective Linux user.

Unfortunately the SPEC marks are never compiled with gcc because it isn't as fast as Intel's compilers, which I presume AMD will use :-). I hope this list will be updated when the K7 is out, since it is probably a good indicator of Linux integer performance.

You wrote:
"If you run a commercial UNIX, you can expect close to linear scaling with multiple processors as everything is done very fine grain."

I have to disagree with you; unless you are running code that fits almost completely into the L2 cache you will not get anywhere near linear scaling with ANY OS - I don't care which one (yes, huge L2's help a lot, but I'll bet Linux 2.2 would also fly on an 8-way Xeon with 2Mb L2 cache each).

You have to remember that with shared memory SMP the processors have to share access to the main memory; and while the memory bandwidth does not get reduced to 1/N (N=number of CPU's) it does approach 1/N more closely with every CPU added...

Depending on the locality of reference, ignoring kernel locks, a big (>= 512k) L2 cache will give you about 90%-95% cache hits for workstation loads, but for server code you spend more time shuffling data for I/O or doing database searches; hardly L2 friendly. I doubt that more than 70%-80% of memory accesses are served out of the L2 cache on a big server.

Processor contention for memory resources can cause a drastic slowdown; a friend of mine once saw a dual processor box perform at 60% (yes, slower!) the speed of a slower single processor box! (there is an article about that on my site)

Ok, using a DejaNews search I found glide.xxedgexx.com, so I know there is an experimental X11 server for the Banshee. I could not find a reference on that site to a working Glide library for Linux/Banshee... Can anyone point me in the right direction? I bought (and reviewed at my site - shameless plug) a Gigabyte Banshee board, and I'd like to make full use of it under Linux as well as Win95.

Don't forget, just like software companies tried to use hard drive serial numbers, volume numbers, ethernet card MAC's they will probably try to use CPU serial numbers - see http://www.cpureview.com/art_is.html for an article on how it could be used for copy protection.

All I can say it they do this, AMD & Cyrix & IDT & Rise stock (and later Transmeta) will be good buys :-)