What Happened To SMP For AMD processors?

Christopher Cashell asks: "Does anyone know what is going on with AMD and support for multiple processors (SMP)? I love AMD CPU's, but I've also come to love dual processor machines. Ever since the Athlon was still an 'in progress' chip code named the K7, and AMD stated that the CPU would support SMP, I've been drooling over the idea. Now, especially, I would love to have a dual CPU Duron box. Has anyone heard anything? I couldn't find anything on AMD's site about it. As I understand it, the CPU supports SMP, so it's just a chipset issue, right? Is AMD working on a SMP chipset? And if not, are any of the other big mobo/chipset manufacturers considering it?"

Comments

Info on 760, 760MP

[ToLu the Happy Furby]

As others have said, the first SMP chipset for the K7 family is the 760MP, due out in December or January. AMD has already released the single-processor 760 chipset--which looks to be the first DDR-capable PC chipset--to motherboard manufacturers; motherboards based on the 760 should be showing up at the end of this month.

It has been pointed out that one of the major reasons AMD has taken so long to get SMP going is that they already sell all of their processors anyways, and already have commitments for all the K7 chips they can make through the end of the year. This is true, but misses a more important point: with some few exceptions (i.e. nerds like us ;) the market for SMP boxes is primarily business servers. This presents two issues:

1) Many if not most Intel SMP boxes are currently stuffed with Xeons. Thus, AMD has been perfectly content waiting for the release of their upcoming "Mustang" core tweak, featuring up to 1MB L2 cache--due out...you guessed it...in December or January--before rolling out the 760MP. Conversely, the big-L2 Mustangs without an SMP-capable chipset are dead-in-the-water.

2) By and large, business still clings to the notion of AMD as a cut-rate unreliable chip company. Despite the fact that knowledgable consumers have switched over to the cheaper faster Athlon in droves, Intel still has a nearly complete monopoly over the x86 business market. This impression of AMD as the "cheapo generic brand" persists despite Intel racking up delay after delay, errata after errata, recall after recall, embarrassment after embarrassment (i820, i840, 1.13GHz P3, Itanium) in the past year and a half. AMD knows that if they release the 760MP and it runs into one rumor of one conflict with one obscure 3D graphics card no business machine would ever contain anyways, their foray into the high-margin world of business computing is over before it began. (Never mind that Intel can release the i840, their new workstation-quality top-of-the-line chipset, with an "errata" which rendered it unusable with ECC memory!) Thus they are being very careful, and rightly so, with their validation process on this one.

Interestingly enough, if they get their act together (and purchasing departments take their heads out of their asses), AMD has a major market opportunity on their hands here. The Coppermine Xeon (i.e. a plain-old Coppermine P3 with $200 tacked on to the price) is incapable of scaling past 1GHz until Intel moves to a .13um process--in about 8 months. The 512kb, 1Mb and 2Mb L2 cache Xeons won't move above 800MHz or so in that time. Meanwhile, the new P4 chips are *not* SMP capable (or at least there will be no SMP chipsets available for them). Itanium is a joke and will likely never be launched. Now, Foster, the "P4 Xeon" will be released, possibly as soon as January, but the large-cache versions of Foster won't be out until Q2.

That leaves AMD with a quarter as the sole supplier of GHz+ large-cache multiprocessing x86 CPUs. Will that be enough to get them into the lucrative enterprise market?? Hard to say. After all, you never get fired for buying Intel...

Alpha MB

[Mike1024]

Hey,

I have read on internet (www.aceshardware.com I think) that you can use existing alpha mb to put K7 into it; word is the K7 uses the Slot A (DEC Alpha) interface and so is supposed to support alpha style SMP. So the K7 should have nice SMP, scable up to 32 processors.

If you wanted just dual processors, this implies A UP2000 or suchlike would do the job, but I can't say for sure.

Here's a qoute from Paul Jakma

Interestingly the new *Alpha* 21264 UP1000 motherboard uses the AMD Irongate chipset.. they also have a dual 21264 UP2000 board based on a DEC chipset. So it seems K7/Alpha chipsets are interchangeable, so then K7 SMP is probably possible using the DEC chipset.

And here's a qoute from Acehardware.com:

Alpha:Slot-A:Slot-B:Athlon KH Yeap Wednesday,
June 23, 1999 (10:00 AM EST)
Ok, at the ongoing PC Expo in New York, Alpha
Processor Inc. is demo'ing its new
Alpha-21264 750 Mhz, which is expected to
come out in July. More interestingly a 1 Ghz
versions of the processor, which runs under
regular air-cool condition, is also demo'ed
along with a Slot-A motherboard, UP1000, and
a Slot-B motherboard, UP2000. For further
details check out this News.com report.

Now, a lot of people have been wondering
about the possibility of running a K7 on an
Alpha Slot-A or Slot-B motherboard. According
to Alpha, yes, this is possible. To make
things even more interesting Alpha's new
Slot-A motherboard, UP1000, uses a chipset
that is a hybrid between AMD's very own K7
chipset, Irongate (AMD-751), and ALI's
M1543C!! PC Watch Japan has a great shot of
this UP1000 motherboard. Also appears on PC
Watch is a photo of the Slot-B UP2000 and a
photo of the 1 Ghz Slot-B Alpha processor.
Special thanks to Daiki for this wonderful
tips.

So, you could try an Alpha dual-processor Motherboard but I can't give you any garuntees.

Michael

...another comment from Michael Tandy.