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AMD 760MP Reviews Galore

Posted by michael on from the drop-20-and-fire-for-effect dept.

Keith Whitsitt writes: "Well the NDA seems to be up on AMD's 760MP chipset, and several hardware sites have a review up. So far Anandtech, 2CPU, SimHQ, and Accelnation all have reviews up of this beast. It sure does look like the 760MP has shaped up to be all we expected it to be and more." Time-on-target hype.

14 of 78 comments (clear)

  1. A bargain at twice the price! by Wakko+Warner · · Score: 3
    The cheapest the Tyan Thunder K7 (dual AMD) board is going for on Pricewatch as of 4 minutes ago is $560.

    Let's see... car payment, or dual Athlons (which are $250 each...)

    - A.P.

    --
    Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?

    --
    "Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
  2. Micron Samuri? by Chaostrophy · · Score: 4

    What ever happened to Micron's SMP Athlon chipset, the one with the 8MB L3 cache on the chipset die? A flury of coverage a while back, and then nothing (I've looked).

    --
    Plato seems wrong to me today
  3. Re:athlon servers by larien · · Score: 5
    Nothing against AMD, but for servers, I'd wait a couple of month to make sure there aren't any 'gotchas' in the new systems. Given the delays in shipping, I'm assuming(hoping?) that AMD have waited until they ironed out all the problems before releasing, but it's still largely untested in the wild.

    That said, I'm glad to see extra competition in the marketplace; CPU power has ramped up considerably since the Athlon debued and gave Intel a scare.

    Also, I'll probably end up buying a 760MP fairly soon :)
    --

  4. Micron Chipsets-- you mean Mamba by ShoeHead · · Score: 3

    I don't know about the Samurai, but

    Micron Mamba chipset (North Bridge only) for the AMD platform is expected to be released in Q3. In addition to DDR SDRAM support, Mamba will also feature 8Mb of L3 cache on the chipset die. The L3 cache will have a sustainable memory bandwidth of 9.6GB/s.

    Micron Scimitar chipset for the AMD platform is expected to be released in July. Scimitar is expected to feature a Mamba core with integrated on-die Rendition graphics.

    copied word for word from mikeshardware.co.uk (an awesome site for not so publicized chipset/tech news)

  5. Cheaper motherbaords coming... by hattig · · Score: 4


    The Tyan is a more expensive board, but ~$200 boards are coming using the AMD760MP (or 760MPX) chipset.

    The MPX is the same as the MP, but does 64-bit PCI at 66MHz, not 64-bit PCI at 33MHz.

    I just want the good stuff from nForce with the good stuff from the 760MPX put together in one great chipset.

    1. Re:Cheaper motherbaords coming... by Bilestoad · · Score: 3

      The cost of the board isn't the only problem. For most people hoping to get SMP Athlons this will mean changing to a WTX case and the special power supply mentioned in the articles. Some ATX cases might be big enough, but not many. There's another $3-500 right there.

      If some company comes up with a SMP Athlon board no bigger than say, the ABIT VP6 SMP PIII board using a standard ATX power supply that might be the one that sells in volume. But I've not even seen a rumor of an ABIT/ASUS/FIC/Iwill board yet.

  6. Re:Why no HyperTransport? by msobkow · · Score: 3

    I'm not so sure about that. For a high end workstation, you would usually be correct, but this chipset is being touted for servers.

    It would not be at all uncommon for a database server to have a couple of the latest SCSI 320 cards running a farm of 15KRPM drives or external RAID chassis. It doesn't take that many of them to saturate a PCI66 I/O channel. Aside from that, you don't want saturated channels on a database server -- you want your I/Os scattered evenly in order to maximize parallelism.

    I'm guessing that 760MP boxen will be relatively competitive with some of the 2/4 way systems from Dell, IBM, et. al., but that is relatively low end competition. To really compete as a server, the systems will have to be configured with:

    • 2+ GB ECC memory, up to 8GB
    • Hot-swap RAID arrays
    • Dual fibre or ethernet controllers
    • Redundant power supplies
    • Hardware failure monitoring

    That said, I'm certainly looking into a box for home use. I don't need 5-9 reliability, so I'm just going to be waiting for sane prices...

    --
    I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
  7. AMD is a ray of Hope by cansecofan22 · · Score: 4

    I think we should all support AMD products because they show the world that the underdog can suceed. AMD was, only 3 years ago, considered a little player in the CPU market. They had a K-6 CPU that the P-II was killing and Intel triedto squease them (and Cyrix) out of the business with a new slot for CPU's. Intel (like most LARGE companies) didnt think anyone would be upset that an upgrade to there product meant a complete rebuildof the system (MB, RAM, CPU). AMD kept going with the support of a few chipset manufacturers and brought socket 7 all the way to 550 MHz. They won customers that way and when the technology needed it, they had those customers buy there new line of CPU's. AMD is still gaining market share with the Duron and K-7 and I hope that they do just as well in the server market, although I think that will be a tougher fight than the desktop was. A company like AMD gives me hope that Linux (and all GNU software) will be able to someday take the desktop from another HUGE company.

    --
    "If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people in the world?"
    1. Re:AMD is a ray of Hope by Sebastopol · · Score: 3


      A ray of hope for what?

      AMD would be doing the exact same thing to the market if they were in Intel's shoes. What makes you think AMD is so much more philanthropic? Same thing with Apple fanatics. Apple and AMD are both COMPANIES, bent on making a profit and dominating the market.

      Competition is good for everyone, but do you really think AMD wants to get 50% of the market, and say: "Ahhh, that's better, now the market is balanced, we can go home now knowing we've done a good job..." Yeah right. They'd immediately try to squeeze Intel out of the picture and control yet another monopoly.

      Slashdot as a whole needs to help itself out of this near total subservience to corporations through such bizarre personifications like "underdog". It's pretty scary from an outsider's point of view.

      ---

      --
      https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
    2. Re:AMD is a ray of Hope by dhamsaic · · Score: 3

      i hear what you're saying, but compared to intel, amd was *nothing*. yes, they had money. they were a big company the way that apple is a big company. yes, they have lots of employees and big budgets, but they weren't considered to be a major player. just like apple isn't a major player. i like apple and i love amd (i've been using amd processors for as long as i can remember), but amd was never percieved to be the corporate threat that they are now.

      --
      Every once in a while I like to masturbate a new word into my vocabulary, even if I don't know what it means.
  8. Why no HyperTransport? by Emil+Brink · · Score: 5

    After spending yesterday reading about all the good stuff Nvidia has crammed into the nForce, including the nice 800 MBps "HyperTransport" link between their versions of the north and south bridges, I threw myself over these long-awaited 760MP exposes, to see what AMD use. I'm more than a little surprised (and disappointed) to find that they went with the "good-old" PCI interconnect, limited to a measly 266 MBps (if it's 64-bit). The weirdness increases when you realise that Nvidia didn't actually develop HyperTransport themselves--it's licensed from (wait for it) AMD!

    I guess the reason is that HyperTransport is too recent a development for AMD to include it in the 760MP, which has been under development and testing for like two years, but still... It's a shame. It seems that even the upcoming "mainstream" SMP chipset, the 760MPX, won't include HyperTransport.

    --
    main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
    1. Re:Why no HyperTransport? by rabtech · · Score: 4

      You nailed it. AMD wants the 760MP to be as rock-solid stable as anything Intel produces, if not more. If the AMD's first venture into the server marketplace is riddled with incompatibilities and reliability problems, then they won't be able to make another run at it for years, if not more.

      That's also why they didn't trust VIA to produce the chipset for this market -- they have proven too unreliable in the past with various PCI issues.

      nVidia is shaping up to be the king for the Home/workstation market, and AMD's chipset should hit the server market.

      Say.... I wonder if nVidia will ever produce an MP-chipset...
      -- russ

      --
      Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
  9. Back again! The BANE of Tyan owners everywhere... by dpilot · · Score: 3

    Did you catch the thing about non-standard pinouts on the power connectors?

    BLAST IT!

    As the owner of two Tyan (mid Rev4 Tomcat I, later Trinity 1590S) boards, they really $%^& this one up. Non-standard PS2 mouse connectors, non-standard serial port connectors, non-standard USB connectors.

    With these connectors it's not too bad, because the Tyan-pinout ones aren't much more, or it's not difficult to modify a standard one. But to mess up on the power supply connector...

    I still haven't been able to get DMA running on the 1590S, on either stock Redhat kernels or using the Jumbo IDE patch. At some level, others have their MVP3's running DMA.

    I have been pleased with the stability of Tyan boards, but between connector issues and the DMA troubles I've been having, it no longer feels safe as a 'default' decision.

    --
    The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
  10. Interesting Benchmarks (summarized)... by CritterNYC · · Score: 4
    Although benchmarks are always open to interpretation, I think some of the numbers are quite interesting here. The Dual Athlon 1.2GHz outperforms the Dual Pentium Xeon 1.7 GHz by 6 to 18% on almost all the tests they ran. Here's a rundown:
    * - The Xeons did outperform the Athlons on the Photoshop 4 portion of the workstation performace scores by 11.4%.
    ** - The Overall System Performance numbers ended up that way due to the Xeons' 20% advantage over the Athlons on the Internet Content Creation benchmarks and the basically even performance on the Office Productivity benchmarks.
    --
    Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc